To my daughter

I can diocese the movement of the heartbeat

In her throat, despite the difficult laughter

Crossing with its ripples of distortion

The luminous muscle and fat She's seven, hoping that through dreaming

She can drive together with an echo

Of merriment the life dispersed to nothing.

She can't believe they have all grown to nothing,

She and those who joined to fire her heartbeat

Out of be fond of or at least with love's elderly echo,

Forgiving, apprehensive, far from laughter.

Uncertainly restored through her day-dreaming,

They have emerg half whole, from the distortion.

Odd then in what way the fact of their distortion

Slips without of view. They wonder at immaculate nothing

Out the window. And she leaves not upon dreaming

Of them only for the flicker of a heartbeat,

Punctuated through some half-heard laughter

Coming and going with a wicked echo:

They should have tried to listen for the echo

Of their failure, on the other hand the same distortion

Deafened them to it as to her laughter.

Now in her laughter they hear something nothing

Quiets' down, fragile as a heartbeat,

The painful notion that they must be dreaming.

The little girl is positive she must be dreaming.

How could they have started this resounding echo

Big as a racketing train or like a heartbeat

Pouring [i]or[/i] part of to the other a tunnel of distortion?

Perhaps she wishes they would the pair say nothing

And to make positive of this, floods them with laughter

Because her doll is laughable This starts up the laughter

Of derision and chastisement in her dreaming.

Stern bad mistress of bad children nothing

Will improve, she scathes them in an echo

Of speeches she one time heard, hot with distortion,

Eerie as an argument, stiff as a heartbeat.

The girl's asleep. Her laughter is an echo

In a dream, and dreaming a distortion,

Designating nothing on the contrary her heartbeat.

Mary Kinkie is the author of sum of two units recent books of criticism, The corrective of Poetry in an Age of unromantic published by the University of Chicago Press; and The justice Is Fury, published by The University of Michigan Pres Knopf is publishing her fifth contortion of poetry, Ghost Ship, in April. She teaches at Northwestern University.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar 1996

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