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Only Child

By D. Nurkse D. Nurkse

I cradled my newborn daughter

and felt the heartbeat

pull me out of shock.

She didn’t know

what her hands were:

she folded them. I asked her

was there a place

where there was no world.

She didn’t know

what a voice was: her lips

were the shape of a nipple.

In the park the child says:

watch me. It will not count

unless you see. And she shows me

the cartwheel, the skip, the tumble,

the tricks performed at leisure in midair,

each unknown until it is finished.

At home she orders:

see me eat. I watch her

curl on herself, sleep;

as I try to leave the dark room

her dreaming voice commands me: watch.

Always we passed the seesaw

on the way to the swings

but tonight I remember

the principle of the lever,

I sit the child at one end,

I sit near the center,

the fulcrum, at once she has power

to lift me off the earth

and keep me suspended

by her tiny weight, she laughing,

I stunned at the power of the formula.

D. Nurkse, “Only Child” from The Rules of Paradise (New York: Four Way Books, 2001). Used by permission of Four Way Books.

Source: Poetry (March 1995).

Biography

D. Nurkse is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Rules of Paradise (2001), The Fall (2003), and The Border Kingdom (2008). His parents escaped Nazi Europe during World War II—his Estonian father worked for the League of Nations in Vienna, his mother was an artist—and moved to New York. Nurkse’s family moved back to live in Europe for a number of years, returning to the United States around the time of the . . .

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