for Chloe

After a day or two, it blackens inside
its clamp and protrudes as hard and thick
from her stomach as a small burnt staub
of rope. Following the book's instructions,
I daub it with rubbing alcohol, swash it back
and forth down to the point where it enters
her stomach. She squirms slightly, or cries out
when it stings. But sometimes I stop and stare
at it, her only connection to the misty other
world. Were I to gain access to her quickly
receding recollection of that place, would all my
present quandaries be solved? Did other souls
help her there to get here? Would I recognize
that world again myself if I saw it? The blackness
of the drying blood cord suggests to me
the notorious incompatibility
between worlds of flesh and spirit. It reminds me
of fresh mornings when I was a child,
kneeling in the garden to see new watermelons
on their cords, an inch farther along than they were
the evening before (I'd mark the place in dirt). Here,
there were mornings, still dark, before she was born,
when I would awaken and hear her mother's faint,
sleep-leaden voice next to me as she counted
fetal kicks -- eleven . . .twelve. . .thirteen. Later,
I'd find the dim wobbly pencil lines of her count
she'd scraped down in half-sleep on some torn-off
scrap of paper. Down that nine-month corridor
of our calmness and periodic terror, our daughter
coursed, into this land. Now, fresh and warm,
wrapped up like a just-baked loaf of bread,
she quickly begins to fill into her time.
For a day or two, I catch a brief unpleasant
odor of the dying flesh. Then, one morning.
half-looking while thinking of something long ago
as I wash her, I realize the old cord-stump
has fallen away completely somewhere, vanished.

Roger Jones teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Southwest Texas State University. His book Strata appeared in 1993, and he currently has poems appearing of forthcoming in Red River Review, JanusHead, Crab Creek Review, Oklahoma Review, and Flint Hills Review. He is poetry editor of the online journal Ceteris Paribus.