Before I had a Name
The first voices to reach my ears-- still bloodwet, crumpled,
half-clogged in birth-grease as my head rocked in the harbor of thighs,
eyes slits in the shock of first light, arms
pinned flipper-like writhing
among slick walls too constricted for even the first scald of air--,
the first voices I heard after knowing
only the weather of blood-thrum,
the seasons of breathing,
the rush of core fluids gurgling like cavewater over stones,
were the voices debating my decapitation and dismemberment.
For I, though I was a 10-month baby, I was slow in coming,
huge blue galleon stalled between the shifting stones,
pelvic bones of my mother.
I was in trouble before I had a name, receiving instruction in how
no trouble is ever one's own, always is shared by another.
My mother lay helplessly glowing with sweat and exhaustion,
the great moonbelly contracting and squeezing for life, hers, mine,
as wise men conversed by a table set with the tools of our undoing.
So these were the voices, desperately hushed, deliberate,
and this my first brush with air, breath-taking, benumbing,
glove-pale hands outstretched, gaudy with the blood of my birth.
Masked faces glared, remote eyes hardening against me
among the low moans and sharp yips of my mother
as I, strangling, I, burning blue,
was trying to suck the great emptiness--
birth-whale beached in the heavy coat of being
caving in these lungs that wanted to
open expansive in the light
of this other world, this sphere before knowing,
where everything was luminous in robes of loose mist,
even the scalpels decisively angled in hands so close--,
when the great thrust came that shoved me clear
and I fell, delivered into their hands, at last.
