Eight Months On

Time, tidewater near, headlong has ripened you

to this glowing fullness, clumsy in dormant love.

Nothing can take you back to remembered couches

carved for bodies’ other sinuous life in the taking only.

Giving swells its selfish possessor for the unbidden

bringing forth, so fraught with blind conduct

both charges in time may mutually assail the point

of beginning, neither having asked to be,

yet both in their endurance verging on prospects

worthy of the last exhausted sob, the first triumphant cry.