By Sheila Black

I feed you warm milk from a dropper.  All night
whinge and moan.

You make a lousy guest—shred the furniture
piss on the rug.

The neighbors gaze at you askance, but I can’t
stop listening to you whistle, in and out

like the conversation the river has with itself, as night
burbles on and on, song

that might almost be a silence--large as a gift, sparkly
as a tree in ice.

(And why must I believe chill makes the world a glass?)

I resist believing in the accident of origin—the grain
in the shell around which a shimmering globe takes form,

but I can picture so clearly the mess of your birth,
the floor of straw, the slick around

a body—why I clutch at you, my purse
of pens, my sack of ash.

Little Grief, little grief.  Who is ever cherished enough?