The unsettled trees seem to share

My tensions of body and mind:

Unable to move before the shell of the wind,

Yielding as much as their nature allows,

They will break if pushed too far,

Splinter to show the white flesh of their wood

And sweet transparencies of sap.

If 1 am pushed too far I will show

The world our wounds, our nine months' child

In his robe of flesh and my wife's tired eyes;

We cannot sleep, alone or together, in case we conceive

Another like this, tearing us from the shell of our senses,

Bending our minds from their roots with his

Eighteen hour shifts of need.

For nine months we have worked through days

And nights; in the nine before his coming

When once you fell I felt his body scramble

In terror round the waters of your womb;

Only the placental coil stopping the leak

From life of his precious blood.