With her birth came

a new sensorium,

new fine bones,

heart walls and chambers,

and in those first days

our voices began to anneal

and invert, until

I could no longer tell

where I ended and she began.

If she is new then so am I,

infant and altered—

her arrival a succession

of expected, namable

splendors that displace me

but seem to place her firmly

in the world.  Still I am the one

she learns to recognize

in the dark, the outline

of my body disappearing

as I cross the night rooms,

bending to lift her to rock

until morning brims the window sill,

split and fused

in a continuous blue seam.