This

Already, he has fallen head first
off the back of the couch,
held a rusted nail in his mouth
without swallowing it down.
I keep the television black,
newspapers folded on the porch.
Still, the stories find me. Airplanes
fall from the sky with children in them.
A young man hikes into the mountains
and is never found. One night, my son
takes the hand of another four-year-old
and runs across a thoroughfare.
If I’d left him what he was, a thought,
I wouldn’t have become this,
a crazy woman whispering thank you
to unseen beings in the air.