Not about Birds

My younger daughter’s first tattoo
is a window, two birds inside one inked square.
Hard to tell if they fly into or out of her body.

                                           *

I know a woman who chronicles her grief
in poem after poem as her body dissolves into smallest
windows of lace the doctors can’t see through.

                                           *

In a town in Wyoming my son looks through the window
of a newspaper box labeled “Free Poems” and chooses one at random
and reads it to me over the phone. Light and time balance

the brief hour of a solstice sun and when I watch a small fish
break the murky window of the lake behind the house
and for a moment I am not sad about anything.