Rondeau After Meeting an Old Friend and Her New Baby

You kept calling it Downer’s Syndrome
in the dark car on the way home
after visiting my friend and her baby at the beach.
“Why does she stick out her tongue?”
“Will she always?” and “What’s a chromosome?”

“Before she was born, did her mother know?”
Your school of questions fishtailing around
my attempts to explain choice, biology.
You kept calling it

what it wasn’t yet the words you found
named an odd sorrow in an old song
we carried on our lips like salt from the sea,
tasted, swallowed, unseen.
Relentless as waves milling sand from stone
you kept calling.

The Odds

Even as a child I felt sorry for my father
for his unending hunger, for the wound
reopened every time he picked me up
and dropped me off. Now, nearly fifty
years later, he uses my birth date
for his passwords, as though they
could open a locked door to the past
to when I was small and crawling.
He plays my lucky numbers
on horses and the lottery
but the odds don’t change.
Debts still sting like
north Ontario winds
of his boyhood,
loneliness, his
father’s belt.

Carla Drysdale’s first full-length collection of poems, Little Venus, was published in 2010 by Tightrope Books in Toronto. Her first chapbook of poems, Inheritance, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in October, 2015. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including PRISM, The Same, LIT, the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, Global City Review, Literary Mama and in the anthology, Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. In May, 2014 she was awarded PRISM's annual Earle Birney poetry prize for her poem, "Inheritance." Born in London, Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France.