First, You’re Born

First, you’re born. The bloody sundown
on the glass will be the scrim
for Daddy (he’s the standing one)
and Mommy (seated next to him)

to pose before. They take you home.
Decades pass. Though few things fall
still fewer rise. Then something dies.
That day you are mortal.

(Daddy’s first. Implacable
as rust, the cancer in his parts.
Mommy later. Terrible.
Their future past, your present starts.)

Another day: you’re holding him
(as old as they when you were born),
a ruddy blank, thus blanketed,
his face suggests the sun gone down.

You bear him home. Come 2 A.M.
you are poking and pressing and watching him breathe.
The little lift and sag of him
tells you the heart underneath

the rosy rising skin still works,
is pushing back the night that lurks
beyond the scrim of damning glass
by which all who pose shall pass.