Adoption Agency, June 11, 1987

Nothing was as I’d thought, the baby not
a bundle but a brink, the day not a rainbow
but a tremor under the diaphragm. I should
have picked her up—the little red knots
of her balled fists, her limbs rigid with sorrow.
The squall. The chasm of her scarlet face. I could

do nothing (did she breathe?) but contain my own wail
and count the sheet’s dancing elephants (yellow)
and sum the ledger of my mistakes. Was I good
enough for this? I was afraid to fail.
But I stayed put.

*

In Carson City the Deer Walk on the Sidewalks

The way the young deer startles at sunrise
to see a human approaching—

the quiet constellation of eyes, nose, ears,
the crown of his antlers.

Boulders rise like molars out of the gums
of suburban yards. Yucca blooms
like white fountains.
And fences, everywhere fences.

O emissary of the oracular…

I set one foot off the curb, making way.
His hesitation to come closer,
then, his graceful, unhurried passing.

I wake up god-hungry and anorexic,
my fears clacking, a bag of bones.

As a prince strolls beggar-lined streets,
velveted and luminous,
blessing the scab-ridden and the cripple,

the deer proceeds like a promise
through his kingdom of pavement,
among the irrigated, blooming roses.

*

After Seeing The Help, My Mother Looks
through a Box of Photos for Cora Washington

         She will ask & you will answer.
               —Lucie Brock-Broido

An archeology. She sifts through the scree
of her childhood, unearthing bone after bone,
searching, searching for the one slender clue.

She leaves behind the fragments of a past—
her father’s smirk, her grandmother’s washboard
posture, the slant of evening across a barn.

Have you been waiting seventy years
for her to find you here, standing like a tree,
witnessing wordlessly, bearing secrets?

You face the camera straight on, powerful arms
at your sides, ready to wring the feathered neck
of any one of the black chickens at your feet,

or to soothe the white child beside you.
Hands that could as easily make fists as biscuits.
As she looks at you, she becomes yours again.

She will ask: Who was I? You will answer.

*

Kathy Nelson, recipient of the James Dickey Prize, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and Nevada Arts Council Fellow, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books) and two previous chapbooks. Her work appears in About Place, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.