Nocturne

A voice in my daughter’s room.
A voice singing sweetly in my daughter’s room.
On the other side of the wall, I lie in my bed,
a T-shirt over my eyes to block the neighbor’s floodlight.
Rain falls in long gray threads against the window. My daughter
draped on the bosom of the voice drinking the song
and the rain pooling in the stroller I left outside
not predicting weather. The opposum that lives in our yard
crouches beside it. The moon up there somewhere.
The voice is smiling, the night has no lips.
My wife asleep beside me doesn’t hear a thing,
has never seen the opposum whose tail reaches out
from under the stroller thick as a watermelon vine.
The voice feeds my daughter, the rain has no hands.
In the mirror in my room, my face.
Pooling in the corners of my daughter’s lips,
is it rain? Is it the juice of one ripe melon? I should go to her
and hold her but I don’t want my footsteps
to scare away the sound.