(You had a plan for me. You wrote in your notebooks—you plotted, reasoned, schemed. to bring me into being. (But reason is a fragile wing).

You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.

These are the objects, the touchable—table, refrigerator, chair,
grease-splattered whiteness and woodgrain.
And here is the sound of the baby muttering and cooing,

Laurie Sheck on “The Idiot.”

 I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolution…