Biffar, Donna ISBN 1589980913 Copyright © 2002 Pudding House Publications All rights reserved E-mail: pudding@johnstown.net

The following poems are reprinted with the permission of their respective copyright holders: Hundred Acre Woods from Water Witching in the Garden, Mellen Poetry Press (1995). The Race from College English, © 1999 Copyright by The National Council of Teachers of English.

Hundred Acre Woods

I.
The doctor said he has a transverse crease,

a fat pad neck and a moon-shaped face.

The doctor said if he lives he might be good at art.

II.
He sings of London Bridge at night, hits high

strange notes and merrily rows his boat

on down the stream. I count his chromosomes

like sheep and worry what the full moon brings.

And while doctors diagnose asthma, viral infection, we

dream of the enchanted hundred acre woods. He cannot

breathe our air, cannot speak our language.

Across the hall Big Bird sings from a caged bed of bridges

over streams that aren't as merry as the red lunch box

he carries every day to school. He struggles,

groping for his words, as I do in poetry, unfamiliar

with the language, the customs of the natives.

The Race

The night before the big race

my boy begins to limp. After

bath he sits on the bed,

one foot raised, thin toes curling

like pared soap. I finger each toe,

after nine years still amazed

at the light flake of nail, the

curve of ligament and bone, his body

wrapped in skin soft as hard

boiled egg whites. It's too much.

He tilts back and laughs,

his moon face a crescent.

He sucks in hard, like he did as a baby

those sterile nights in the veil

of an oxygen tent when the doctor said

this might be it, when the doctor said

if he lived he might be good

at art. Red monitors mirrored

the silver crib. I climbed in

past the wires and tubes anchoring

his life. The white room was black.

When the nurse came in on a sliver

of light, her pale dress a polyester

whisper, I'd already unsnapped

his sleeper and placed my palm

on his purplish chest. Monsignor said

watch for the light. He said listen

for the thrum of angel's wings.

What he meant was air.

How finally my boy is getting away.

Tonight far off lights glisten like small lives,

or is it fireflies bending and tapping the glass-

their wings lifting then dropping like flags,

the signal to begin.

Upon Your Breathing

All night I wake and listen

for your breath through the walls,

seeping past the points of nails,

the grains of wood from trees long dead-

these bodies of small sound and air

with arms and legs flailing

through the crossing darkness,

and I listen.

Listen. You came to me

when there was no water, no air,

and the doctors heard your heart,

and took you

in soundless white-skinned sheets,

chanting of your moon face,

your simian crease, how breath might

stop dead in your lungs. But here

is your hair, thin as a fishes' breath,

your eyes, your egg shell skin cracking birth

into this sentence,

and these messengers of air and sound

you create-

their smudged all-night faces

born in butterfly lungs,

passing through the deaf, enclosing trees.