The Girl Who Can Not Hear

The child is not a metaphor

for seeing,

though her face behind a square of dirty glass

slides past not like a girl

but like an image of a girl.

No, she is a maker,

not a means:

when I wave and wave

it is because she wills it

as she watches me grow smaller

from the window of her yellow bus.

What that she doesn't hear

do we hear?

Only sounds outside ourselves;

whereas I've been made through her

undistracted love of being loved

to represent steadfast care,

waving from the corner

that every morning she leaves behind

and every afternoon retrieves.