My Dearest Child, Unborn

Someday, I hope you wrestle a black snake that is longer than you are tall and the piss scent of its oil stays with you all afternoon and until you are old. I hope the red winged blackbird who does not know better than to build her nest in the goldenrod that’s come up in the alfalfa and fescue makes you weep as she cries over the windrows looking for where she once built a home and I hope you sneak out barefoot and are so busy falling in love with the stars that you plant your feet squarely in manure, and never forget the feeling of cow shit between your toes.

I hope you get ticks and leeches and chiggers. I will give you hot needles and clear finger nail polish.

Someday, I hope you won’t mind eating a few bugs if I don’t soak the morels in the salt water long enough and be excited the next year when the may apples start coming up. Someday, I hope you learn to like sassafras tea, licorice root, and salads made of watercress and sour grass and how I showed you put your thumbs together to call the doves down from the power lines and draw flowers and war paint on your face with bloodroot.

I hope you help with birthing and burying before you’re old enough to worry about either one.

Someday, I hope you will know the sting of nettles on your calves and will listen, watch closely while I mash the stems of jewelweed in my palms and rub the juice on the red bumps to drawl out the sting. Someday, I hope you will watch with awe while I sling stones across a still pool in the creek and let me take your small hand palm up in mine, bend your fingers around a flat rock, cock your arm back, and show me the twinkle in your eye while you count the skips across the water and that you will remember how I showed you to light the scroll of sycamore bark and carry it smoldering along with you to keep the mosquitoes off when the dark is coming on in the woods.

I hope you get a black eye, a broken heart, and a dozen stitches. I will give you frozen peas, good poetry, and a story for your scar.

Someday, I hope you eat a crawdad and a frog leg, and never use more than a single match to start the fire you cook them on. Someday, I hope you keep the molted brown and white feathers of the juvenile red-tailed hawk we find in the pasture in a special place and that the far lights of a strange city remind you of the orange explosions of day lilies in the ditch and the scent of lilac reminds you of home in the spring.

Someday, when I tell you that you are too young to be in love, that you’ll lie to me and tell me you’re going to the movies and drive around to the back gate and down the lane to teach your lover the sounds of barred owls and the names of constellations and learn the shapes of their hands and lips.

Someday I hope you do not stay in and watch cartoons on snow days, but go out into the knee deep silence and follow fox tracks and watch drifts form and that I can thaw your small hands in my own when you return for hot chocolate and an afternoon nap.

Someday, I hope I settle down enough to give you a place we both know I won’t leave.