Overlooked is a Compound Word

                                        A child’s croup-thick cough, barked alarum bell,

wakes me as I wash with night’s long tide.

I shiver, stand to dress, then hover

                                        at the chest, over the breath, of my sleeping child.

In the city’s soundscape, gunfire, perhaps, snaps.

I tell myself it was far away or, better yet,

                                        it was a car, a firecracker, steel slapping train tracks

ten streets away. Back in bed, I list thin walls, bullets,

faulty wiring, bronchioles small as sand

                                        under my daughter’s ribs. I dream of a girl

with moon-white hair and the long fingers

of a saint praying in an old painting.

                                        Invisible, she is adrift in a crowded cafeteria,

an inarticulate ache in her wake.

By light of day, I live again,

                                        drop my daughter off at school and, mist lifting,

find the scarf I lost last week looped around a fence end

by some thoughtful passerby, its pattern a talisman only to me.

                                        I think it had been there for days.

I did not see it and then I did:

rain-faded and familiar as my own hand.