Four Years after Your Deliberate Drowning

I still can't unimagine things.

Here, in the factual minutes before sleep

the daughter we wanted stands before me.

I know she is ashamed.

Why else would she appear like this, stoop-

shouldered, a string of beads in her hand?

"Our Father," she starts, and the chain jerks

through the pulley of her palm, down

into a well where the water

-being water-covers your face...

I think she would bail

all the water from the earth if that would make you

appear, once, before

I fall asleep, make you call off the dream

where we watch from the bleachers our daughter

tracing on the face of the pond her perfect

eights: those spyglasses, eternities.