I have been outside less, I have taken to saying, in the days since my daughter was born— passive, as though it were somebody

else who bore her. And bore her, I also have taken to saying, as though she were a hole.

I have witnessed a woodpecker force,

through the week, a gape in my neighbor’s barn side. I have watched as my daughter knocks, woodpecker-like, her searching mouth

into my breast. But I don’t mean to say she instills in my body an absence. What nothing

assembles within me was already there.