Wake Me in a Silly Stupid Way
(our daughter’s request, post-stroke, most mornings)

My husband is a pirate,
a patch, a breach of laughter
in the morning. Stealing
our daughter’s memory
of what she’s lost
from her waking eyes
so what remains is this ocean
of love that amuses. He steers
the stolen ship of what might have been
around the rocks, through shark-infested
waters that roil when her brain recoils
at sound and wobbly stairs and boundaries
not set by her—the flash and flare
of fists that harm the ones she loves,
the contrition that plunders her days.
He peg-legs in and pulls a parrot
from his pocket, feathers ruffed
from the climb upstairs, squawking
in some raucous rum-punched tenor,
jigging with the sunlight as it streaks
across the pine planks of her bedroom floor.
Other days he’s a wizard in a pointy hat
or a jester with a bell, or his own sweet
grinning goofy self that he magics
from yesterday’s debacle or last
night’s unkempt sleep. He saves her
daily from her own laments.
Switch-baits regrets for buried
treasure—this day and all its charms.

*

When our daughter with Down syndrome is diagnosed
with a rare neurodegenerative disease, I think of the skunk
after Maggie Smith

who, three nights in a row,
woke us with the burning sulphureous sting
of a stink and I ran around closing windows.
Like all those midnight runs to the ER
when our daughter kept having “fainting spells”
and turned blue. Then someone told me

it takes almost two weeks for a skunk
to refill their glands after spraying,
that if it happens back to back to back
you’re dealing with a bigger problem.

*

I Believe in the Night: A Caregiver’s Credo
(lines from Rilke, Book of Monastic Life I, 11)

I believe in the night, creator
of mirrors and monsters,

and in the stars, dead now
but dangling direction.

I believe in shadow’s
embrace. Dusky lover

of all the nations of my heart—
their bicker of sadness,

canticles of delight. I believe
in unfinished hems, threads

trailing through dark,
thin ribbons of fiddle

for fingers searching,
rosaries lost long ago

in the backwoods of hope
where brambles catch

starlight, glimmer like fireflies
always moving. I believe

in the dirt, in cicadas’
vast slumber,

the emergence of lovers,
bulbs, dew worms inching

refuse into friable loam.
I believe in the soil—

that darkness can make you sing.

*

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, Poetry Northwest, SWIMM, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.