Fierce business, this child
rearing
up from plum waters
and veined purses
unclasped to reveal
long-fingered hands, waxed lashes and legs.
You are
so many dancing cells,
like some overhead scene from a
‘40s movie:
all stardust formations,
folding, unfolding, folding again,
the jaunty soundtrack your
entering battle cry –
music on antiseptic air.
Your bruise-colored veins
mapped the route
across eons of night
to this place.
And your seashell ears knew
that cosmic whisper –
This one, just through there –
so you climbed in,
nodding to stars as you passed.
Sylvia spoke of stolen horses
circling a marble womb,
but mine
pulses heavy:
Round as moonlight, cupped hands, a cheek full of coins.
They shake loose the dirt
still clinging to your roots,
those ancient, helixed tendrils
hardwired to find
the soft, fertile soil
behind fences of flesh.
You are
peapod small
and impossibly big.
Like ink left to spill in the cracks
of some hand-hewn surface
old as the earth,
you poured out,
filling me up.
Now I sit, milk-stained
and all-over leaking,
nails mooned in dirt from
plucking you up,
inhaling your bloom
as my own body breathes ferric.
