My sister gently tosses
across our double bed a tiny
gray ball of fur that I catch and then
carefully toss back. We laugh, amazed:
It’s a little life! she marvels, A little life!
After a few more tosses we let it fall softly
to the mattress where it stands, shakes
its furry young self and scurries off
to find a place where we’re not.

Now my sister’s child harbors her own
little life: a tiny thing still,
the size, perhaps, of a grapefruit seed?
A seahorse? A thimble?
That something so small could cause
such a storm! One day he says
Keep it, the next he says,
with more conviction, It has to go.
She wants to save him, wants to do
as he would like, but the images,
the words her mother gave her
all those years have settled
like the kernel in her womb.

She wishes she were like the others
for whom this might have been
an inconvenience, a fork
in a road not taken. But all the time
her boyfriend frets and wavers
she knows what she has to do.
There will be no tossing
of this little life.
                        

My father nailed some plywood
up in the mulberry tree
so I could have a treehouse.

I spent many lonely summer days
among the dusty mulberry leaves
reading and watching ants crawl
along the branches. If I climbed higher

I could see the train snake along
the valley floor, watch vultures
circling in the pale desert sky. 

In time, I saw that the tree’s flesh
had begun to grow around the nails
and the plywood too; the tree accepted
this addition as part of its life story.
                        

Here is my body’s younger self
crouched on a rock. Those feet 
are the feet by which I have trod 
the earth, but the photo
was taken before living
had given them
bunions and fungus.
The hair that falls
in a hazy fan
down the shoulder
is this hair before it took on
shades of silver and gray.
The face in the photo
is turned away, watching
the winter sun settle
beyond the mountains
while the future
crouches behind the rock,
waiting to climb the young back,
this same back with the turn
in its spine which forms
the little hump where
for six decades I have stored
my slights and sorrows.
All that I have ever thought
or dreamed or done 
took place within 
this scaffolding of bone.