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Their Only Child
I am the one that doesn't get away. Their blood tumbles with promise, teeming quicksilver too luminous to stay; I am their whole catch, landed and streaming
rainbows. Those others they dream of—the charmer, the saint, my father's magnificent son— circle the wormed hook, but sensing harm, slide on forever. I am the one
trailing their bait through the film of the ideal, rising to this flawed light. No more, no less than actual, like a death, I am the real one, the waking, the caress.
Rhina P. Espaillat
From
Landscapes with Women: Four American Poets, |
