On Turning One

Untidy balance of belly and diaper,
my daughter stands in our living room
and shakes a piece of wrapping paper
with everything she’s got,
the way a father shakes a pen
before he tries again to sign his name.

Earth has returned with its blue light
to the space of her beginning.
She looks up, surrounded by balloons,
satisfied we are not traveling to another
room or floating upstairs. We are exactly
where she keeps us spinning.

One year ago she lay on a metal scale,
felt with her small nakedness the air
empty of body. She cried her first cries
and the nurse said it was a good thing
and that she liked the name. It means life,
I said, keeping my hands from reaching
toward shivering fists, shut eyes, skin
pale as a mist out of nowhere.

Zoey squawks, reaching for more paper.
We look up as a tiny blur
zips from the sky, an iridescent pinprick
framed in the window, sipping sugar water.
This much we know. The name for the red shimmer
around this hummingbird’s throat
is gorget, which sounds like gorgeous.
And the electromagnetic radiation
touching it is light.

Derek Sheffield’s collection, Not for Luck, won the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize judged by Mark Doty. His other books include Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and A Revised Account of the West, winner of the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart. Coeditor of two collections, Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, he lives with his family in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains near Leavenworth, Washington, where he birds, hikes, plants, fishes, and forest bathes. As a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College, he teaches poetry and ecological writing and serves as co-chair of the Sustainability Committee. He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.