a memory

I remembered the afternoon I called you,
curled on my bed with someone's good book
in my palm, nestled softly in the waning light

and under my gently roaming fingers
the baby moved – not to my hand-touch,
but inside, an insistent flutter,

not like the swiftly beating heart
on the doctor's monitor, not like the slow
appearance of a plus-sign on a drugstore test.

I called you, my gently rolling daughter's
mother's mother. I called you like the woman
standing at my back while I held the kite string

on a pushy spring day, the diagonal shape so
far above us I could only feel the jerk of the
cord around my fingers, holding us to earth.