I dream we’re exiled to a distant land,
a home for careless parents searching for
the lost, a place where locals understand
we’ll never find what we had years before;
and when a stranger there makes idle chat,
we know he’ll know that we have a dead child
or two and he does too and he’ll know that
you talk about the dead as if alive.
For in the waking world we hesitate
to mention her; we have to make a choice
between our neighbor’s staring at his plate
and somehow seeming to have lost his voice,
or our just saying that we have no daughter,
the way a drunk might say his gin was water.
