What My Child Learns of the Sea

What my child learns of the sea
Of the summer thunder
Of the bewildering riddle that hides at the vortex of spring
She will learn in my twilight
And childlike
Revise every autumn

What my child learns
As her winters fall out of time
Ripened in my own body
To enter her eyes with first light

This is why
More than blood,
Or the milk I have given
One day a strange girl will step
To the back of a mirror
Cutting my ropes
Of sea and thunder and sun.
Of the way she will taste her autumns—
Toast-brittle, or warmer than sleep—
And the words she will use for winter
I stand already condemned.