She wants to have a baby. We will try soon, close to right about now. She’s plotting our course again, with a thermometer and charts. Not exactly the gas lamp, snow-stone of Dylan’s Christmas. I know the sweaters, the cold, the red cheeks, the village markets, the church with the spire and those clucking chickens. Know because lived in central Europe during the Cold War, built upon the twentieth century. I cannot escape it, that century, and those wars not mine but my father’s and his. A sensibility. Imagine being born today and what you’d say about ’68 or ’73, in turn attached to ’48, an awakened West and a vibrant America. But the baby. We spread the news upon our first moment of success. Then had to send recantations. Everyone sees fit to tell you then that they had one or two miscarriages themselves. So-and-so, too. They heard about. “We had four,” our landlady shared. As did a professor at the university. As a brother about his brother and sister-in-law. Said that we cannot conceive here, in this house. Where the vibe was off and where that first girlfriend on my birthday in my brother’s room under his posters of bicyclists. A room now stepdad’s office. Though the cardinal there, and the pine, and the naked oak, and the baffler on the feeder, and my mother, all wonderful and beautiful and real. Cannot. The period over and the time is now, so says the moon and the charts. We’ll try at dad’s up north.
“I dispraised thee before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in love with thee”
