On a Pale Pegasus

Our priest urged the rhythm method

My wife and I opted for something

more like jazz, strong but flexible

And for that produced with

the embarrassing terror of

accidental combustion,

a daughter

And so my love for our daughter

was a confused wall of marble,

heated and pressured

and densely streaked with lack of intention

I pictured her

held up against this calcium carbonate love

The near ivory reflected her well

Her cheeks as dual suns

Her nose a shier, pug star

But somewhere across the eyes

and near the gentle collapse of her throat

there streaked ashy stratum fissures

obscure and fatal

As with all of her birthdays

(precious stones collecting in our hearts)

She shared her last

with a despised and diseased twin

A child also of accident

This twin who pulled her down

making our daughter move

and breathe in ocean wet sand

fighting a shadow with ambition,

twice the weight of her body

that worked its malicious hands with thousands

of mucus shiny serpents as fingers

into her chest and lungs

In the first minutes of morning, every morning,

the coughing would seize her

Those hissing hands would squeeze her passages

writhing with renewed jealousy

and it was then

my daughter began

In between short, muffled kitten hacks,

the scrape of movement upon our ceiling, her floor,

jolted through the lightning rod of me

(my love became that way, maniacally receptive

to all energies she could display, I drank them in)

and released into the basement and foundation below

Beside me, my wife slept vigorously withdrawn

her snore a steady trot

while our daughter moved mountains of her white,

golden-knobbed furniture in the dark

After I first heard her nocturnal movements,

ragged hoof beats and snorts

I ripped up her uncooperative carpet

the very next day

and laid bare her hardwood floor

So then, when she thought I was asleep, she impossibly pushed, with an adrenaline panic for life, LARGE, FILLED BUREAUS, HOPE CHESTS, A HUTCH DISPLAYING HER RIGID RHYMES, A TWIN BED, HER STICKER-COVERED DESK, RE-HUNG HER HECTIC, TENSE CRAYON DRAWINGS, REARRANGED COUNTLESS PORCELAIN PEGASI (never still for long, a silent stampede of noble, rearing equines, front legs staggered in the effort of ascent, hoofs she painted red for prettiness, a silenced message curled in the frozen haste of their sprung wings), RAINBOW LAMPS, END TABLES, ALL HER SLUMBERING GALLERY OF STUFFED ANIMALS

around into new order

as if her life were the board games we played

her furniture the game pieces

Either we had started without her

or the deck wasn't shuffled right

and she insisted, with each grunt and push

of her enervated limbs,

we needed to start over

I didn't tell my wife

that the scrape-shock descending

through my shameful heart

became less

My wife didn't notice

the furniture was no longer drastically changed

Nothing large and encouraging

mistakenly blocked our daughter's door

Her room was frighteningly negotiable

There was perhaps the empty wicker hamper moved

or that green bean bag chair that wheezed tiny balls of Styrofoam

as I struck it with my fists

was in another, nearby corner

My wife didn't know,

when I started making our daughter's bed,

how I would hold up her bedclothes

to the morning light of the window

and measure our daughter's life and disease

slain into a salty aura of sour sweat

that described her outer form,

like a fully eclipsed sun,

upon her sheets.