Cynthia Macdonald began her professional life as an opera singer During that time, she started to write poetry and eventually decided she could not do both. She has published six books of poems, the last four and an upcoming one, Alight, with Knopf. She graduated from the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, where she is now on the adjunct faculty. Macdonald has a small psychoanalytic/psychotherapy practice.
A sliver of light, a splinter of light, a needle of lightstitches the black clouds together, obliterating bluein the theater of prediction, the theater of equilibrium.How dark it is. Turn on the spot. A baby sits inhis crib sucking his thumb. Behind him, vintage 1930,a man raises heavy beams onto his shoulders.He walks with them, then trips. Beams split intoshafts down which he falls, baby tucked in his shirt.Wet. Drops. Dark. A bright fall sheds light onempty arms. Weapons. Baby, now grown, wonders.Wonders beam into corners. Silence.Just say what comes into your mind.Lightening. A flash. Danger. Silence.
People forget their children in the strangest places.Crossing Fifth in front of Saks, Little Janeleft behind. In the basket of a bicycle, then out of it,Little Paul, whose absence was unnoticed untila neighbor brought him home. Little Raylinn of theProjects left at Burger King while Mama mether mark in Union City. And Little Hetty home fromschool to find an empty house cleared of its furniture.Her Mom forgot to tell her they were moving.And then there's What's-Its-Name who watches over us,checking his wrist to see if the time is right, pattingher breast to check the milk run, folding the timetable,pulling its trunk with its trunk when it moves towardIndia. The celestial throne is passing hard and the studdedjewels poke What's-At-The-Bottom of it all. We prodthe godly cheek so It/She/He, He/It/She slides off; the leftbehind, to be exact: that's us. The air is absent-mindedand the empty sky of Paradise is pocked with small pink shells,those baby fingernails which couldn't quite keep holding on.