At last, it has happened. And wife
and child both live—a thing you take
no more for granted than sun-stricken exiles
take the river, or the shipwrecked the shore,
having heard her cries; held her hands fast
to the trough-rim as she struggled; and wondered,
as good men will, how it is that any woman
ever endures this. Now the boy’s asleep
with the birth-sheen still on his eyes, fur
clinging to his wrinkled skin. You barely dare
to breathe on him, though he’s flecked
with hay and damp with the sniffing
of puzzled beasts. You fear, above all
things, what you might do out of love.
You mull what’s passed: the miles. The thirst.
The sky darkening as you knocked on doors, half-
dreading the refusals that you knew would come—
exhaustion numbs your limbs to the itch
of straw. Your body stills, knowing its own
brokenness; your mind runs wild with questions:
By what strange sifting have she and you
(yoked together by need, poor, plain,
not specially pious) been found fit
to bear such inconceivable tidings?
You don’t feel you can ask her just now;
her dark eyes fix on the child with what
could be tenderness or newly kindled
ferocity. There is so much you can’t yet
ask of her: it’s past midnight; she is tired
and you are old—too old, really, to be sitting
up thinking like this, yet here you are,
homeless in homecoming, sheltered
amid the whiffs of shit and scandal
with the woman both your wife and not-
-your-wife, delivered of a child your own
and not-your-own, waiting for the next word
from God, who’s asked you of all people
to be—of all things—his father.