Last night my daughter came to the side of the bed with a nightmare still in her eyelids.
As I slid her body, like a velvet puppy,
under the sheets next to me, she said the dream was about a war.
And I see how the soft folds of her six-year-old brain
could get there.
The next morning, she fell on her scooter and told me after,
“I fell violently to the ground.”
And is there another way to fall?
When the cottonwood tree in the backyard had to come down,
five men pulling with a rope guided her body, 80 feet of it,
piece by piece, back to the earth.
The whole house shook when each section hit the sloping summer grass.
I wondered if the tree would forgive me when I took down the fence and allowed
the men into the yard to take her.
And today, on a Wednesday morning,
when my sister and her daughter went to get the breakfast check at Denny’s,
an older woman in a booth alone had already paid for it.
So, to my own daughter going forward, some falls are violent,
and sometimes a stranger catches you
believing, at all cost, that you cannot be broken, not this time.