Meadow

(to my daughter—in explanation of her name) 

Balance is what we mean the name 
to tell her when she’s suckled news 
into her brain that birth knits her 
into the nervous system of 
the spastic, plastic planet, 

the mediation of the seen 
oases in the dance of heat 
viewed sidewise by desert fathers 
as a vision of the presence, 
greasy burden of dominion; 

a coming with the world to know 
why we gather and shape to life 
germ, egg, milk, grass-seed, tree-seed, meat, 
to live—share and plowshare—with beasts 
and trees working God’s own green fate, 

a community with the elect— 
proving ourselves and proving God
in the communion of his breath 
all toads and weeds and fieldmice weigh 
in peril with our infant will; 

 the name may remind her, when she 
can mind the name, that we chose birth 
as an experiment in restraint 
which she may join in dance, in song in 
concert with this lurching earth