Epitaph for Children I Don't Have

My children drowned:

a boy and a girl

not even born but that couldn’t stop it.

The cold lake was a place I had been.
I was returning. The white veils fixed
over their two faces, fogged breath
on a mirror that couldn’t help but
give back the world. My bare

feet on the broken bank beside
several small shells
that were all tokens
of special varieties of grief.

My drowned children: I have lost
            you, familiar as the water returning
            in brackish conversation between
            tributary and tide, I have lost you

not once but twice.
To the deep, then to the morning
when you never were.

You had a mother. When I pulled you
from the water of myself onto the shore
of myself, my breath frosted the mirrors
of your faces and they could not help

but return two images: hers and my own.

You had a mother, but perhaps
no progenitor more real than
the guilt that pushed
your small bones out
of my pores like sweat.

If I had spoken to her
of you, she would not have known
the names that together we gave you.

The news of your deaths
would have broken upon her as an empty wave.

This world a repository for small
sadnesses, cast earthward.
This world that turns up
empty palms in recompense
for all we have interred,
a gesture feeling of forgiveness
until the very moment
it does not.

Drowned children
the news of your two deaths
first in water, then in morning
might have appeared to her as
gift or blessing: the prophecy

of a future wound from which
to carry the relief of never having.

But a morning arrives full

of empty beds and bedrooms like palms

upturned to demonstrate how little they hold

and a night comes when you return

to the water and find it filled with your

children. Children who you pull from
the lake until the lake runs dry and you
are standing alone in its chalk center.

Above,
there is the moon and she wears

her white veil and drowns in the sky.

Below,
the dry banks replete with the bodies
of things you never had to lose.

There will be nothing else.