You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive.

from “Any Common Desolation,” Ellen Bass

•••

Looking at the baby on her 11th day in the world,
you think, as everyone does, looking at such
pink perfection: Perfect.

Because she is. You don’t want to let your wayward
mind rampage into the what ifs or the inevitable
sorrows that come with having a heart,

so you land on one word: Alive. What a thing to be
made of egg and sperm, to be carried inside another
human for nine months, to emerge, to live a life.

Maybe because you’ve recently watched your own
mother dwindle to her end, listened to her final
breaths, that you now study the tiny nose

on this new one and wonder, not for the first time
about an infant, how does she breathe out of that
tiny thing? You keep adjusting the blanket

she burrows into like a newborn koala, hoping
this bald jellybean is getting enough oxygen, when,
a dozen days ago she wasn’t breathing air at all.

Her little heart will break one day, and you
so want that never to happen, but you know that
it is what these lifetimes hold, whether

we break our own or someone does it for us,
often unintentionally. Your own mother surely
did not mean to break your heart. But still.

You think, again, not for the first time: It is so
something to be born into a body, into aliveness.
It is so not nothing.

Even with the heartbreak, just being here
might be the biggest something
of all.