"Outside Less."
I have been outside less, I have taken to saying, in the days
since my daughter was born, passive, as though it were
somebody else who bore her.
And "bore her," I also have taken to saying,
as though she were a hole.
I have witnessed a woodpecker force, through the week,
a gape in my neighbor's barn side.
I have watched as my daughter knocks, woodpecker-like, her
searching mouth into my breast.
But I don't mean to say she instills in me an absence.
What nothing assembles within me was already there.