No One Decides These Things

Once, when she was four years old,
she took the hand of her father
and stepped over the puddles left
in the potholes from the rainstorm.

One puddle was underneath an exhaust pipe.
It shone with oily colors: swirls of red, yellow, green.

"Daddy, I see a dead rainbow."

Her father clutched his heart
because it was such a beautiful thing
for her to say.

The years have gone fast.

Here she is now,
thirty-one years old, trying
to breathe new life into a dead bird,
mouth to beak,
with her own small son watching
very carefully.