BIRTH
Low-sun afternoon we cross the silvered field,
autumn grasses’ brief path split
by the stranger’s feet. I drop to my knees
in a pool of broken water.
He helps me up. “Please no,” I say.
“A child cannot be born here,” the stranger quotes.
“I was born here.”
He shakes his head no,
“No child can be born here.”
”Where will I be?” I ask.
He stays silent
as he did those first days.
I can barely walk to lean upon him.
*
Distant hospital.
*
Sometime during labor’s deluge he lets go my hand and
vanishes. The pain’s solid wall
holds me in My body and this infant
the whole and only
possible world
at its terrible center From within
a son appears seeking
the umbilical cut snaps electrically
soon attaches with his mouth;
blood and waxy vernix
gleam. He suckles instantly A nurse commends his feeding
The doctor mentions a perfect placenta
and begins to stitch
seams in what’s torn, black thread, numb.
The baby and I gaze with one another until he
sleeps. The boy red upon my naked chest.
REGISTRATION
In warm water and dim light
the baby spreads his arms and legs,
a star in the basin.
A nurse cleans off thick fluids,
wraps him up,
then returns him to my arms.
She encourages nursing and my own
sleep, but among personnel
and birth technology I cannot rest.
Before unadvised release
I am given a form to fill:
Child’s Name to be determined
Mother’s Name unknown
Father’s Name Stranger
Address none
Date of Birth
The nurse looks over
my shoulder, “You’re about nineteen or twenty. Don’t you know
your birthday?”
At Current Residence I ask for a map
which cannot be provided.
Our home’s yellow cloth
dropped between boundaries
appears as thinnest strands—
nondimensional unmeasured—
I lived in the space between.
Mother’s Maiden Name abandoned
Mother’s Place of Birth yellow desert
The rest of the form mimetically blank.
A line is where I come from,
but cannot designate it
or return. The border-center compound—
horizonless earth has been folded in
gapped non-nation// from each state
hidden — a largish vanished home
amidst every other jostled together
until from thing to thing
no border rises among eternal transition.
I hand a mostly clean page to the doubting nurse.
She inspects body temperatures, pulse rates,
not even a beat between moments out here —
the minutes crowd like raindrops in a pool.
On a chart she certifies our blood pressures.
We will go soon, but where? At the town’s edge
I did not look back.
We cannot return.
Maybe gray falling buildings were never home.
The border opens
stark doors, bare welcome.
The stranger will not abandon the center.
He totes a worn basket
of bitter leaves, their oils pungent
on his fingertips. He digs roots,
drapes fresh hollows with waxed canvas.
Condensation from barely damp sand
trapped beneath impregnable fibers drips
into a jar. Hours and hours later he drinks.
Our child sleeps on my chest.
Someone must inhabit the border
or it becomes irretrievable
like I am lost now. A child
cannot be born there, but wasn’t I
in the moment before beginning?
The nurse removes a tray of untouched dinner.
Didn’t I come from not knowing?
I set the baby at the foot of the bed and climb out
unsteady. My body shakes and blood rushes.
In a plastic closet my clothes smell dirty.
They are a man’s old jeans
and grease-shiny flannel shirt found in a drawer
at one center house,
garments too large
for a desert-nourished frame. I dress then
sit on the bed waiting to be signed out, staring at the baby.
When the doctor comes in
he asks whether I have considered adoption
and I say, “I don’t even know
if I can take care of this one.”
The baby just fits in my arms.
Onto the street we are checked out
in complete poverty
I, malnourished, nurse.
I must get home,
but the border is no one’s home,
not even mine. I brought our son
into a nation, into a town.
For the baby’s sake, a roof and warmth.
Because of him,
half interstitial, half strange,
I cannot say no, also cannot go
forward or back.
From interior suspension
a child has come
intact with requirements. I walk and hold him, press
the empty womb slosh.
HOMELESS
On a painted green park bench,
the wooden kind hardly anywhere anymore
I sit nursing him. I cry. He doesn’t.
An old woman asks if the place beside me
is vacant. I nod and she sits next to us.
Murmuring, she knots a pink scarf
to preserve white curls Wind
dives through naked black branches.
With kindness she asks the baby’s name. New,
he cannot be slung
between shifting not-places. He anchors
in a town
where people are given names.
Clara, from the nursing home ventured out to feed chickadees
just before dusk on a winter-dead day.
She pats my knee. I came from nowhere for my child.
He came from the border to join.
Clara asks again, “What’s his name?”
I choose quickly. “I’ll call him Needle.
It’s the first thing I saw
after he was born.” The stitches hurt now.
She hands me birdseed,
the first food I’ve eaten in days.
With his mouth locked around my nipple,
Needle sleeps,
yellow foremilk in his belly.
“Where do you live?” Clara asks.
“Nearby.”
She nods, “Do you have a place to sleep?”
“Very near.” She gives me the seed bag.
Apologizing that the owners
do not allow guests in the old folks’ home
she stands up bent from the bench,
touches my cheek, “Take care,”
she whispers, “I often come to this park.”
Slowly she goes. Walking’s difficult on dormant grass to
the one room apartment where rules prevent
overnight visitors and pets.
THE HOLLOW TREE
Trees
in various states of undress
do not demure.
A brown crumpled skirt awkwardly adorns
each branch of sycamore.
Near the boldly nude gingko
a young oak furred in fox, aloof, quivers.
Bark patterns paths
to and from branches of
hard little buds,
brown and shining beneath the moon.
Clutching Needle I climb up a silver maple and crawl into a hole
where the maple lost its oldest bough.
Sideways we lay in the rotting nest,
a soggy roof and bed among insects.
Taps and chirps wash through us
into maple roots pulling sound underground.
Generally and impersonally, nighttime listens
to a town fallen under the moon’s spell.
Each roof and eave slaked with chromium
shelters evergreen shrubs dulled to blue.
In the lull glow upon eastern window panes
a reflected moon gambols its placid arch,
the few eclipsing clouds lined with mercury.
*
I dream home’s hourless stone;
rounded, stray
granite
shadows desert. Without water gray rock further lightens.
Thirst lines my throat.
Bonded yellow fields.
I wrap cold meals for travelers.
Perpetually
at the center
unfurl bolts of yellow cloth,
set a menu: roots with soil washed off,
stinging leaves boiled plain.
During unchronicled history
the border-center produces no fruit.
I search for company.
Long ago, my people abandoned the arid home.
Without name or numbers
their disposition, gone world
through a dry stalk or hollow reed
stripping information.
Our leader vanished
into time and sparse vegetation.
I search
through a split branch;
did he journey onward or back
to a disembarked world? Small white hairs
of a leaf’s silvered underneath
fringe limp blossoms.
The border-center with aged cedar walls
and fire ring upon incendiary open prairie
stands, falling. I remain.
The dream does not differ from day I
wake (where?) in the damp hollow.
Eyes sealed with sap
and sleep’s sand won’t see.
Blind I crawl. Needle’s searching mouth
sounds animal ravenous.
While he nurses from a swollen breast
I peel amber from my lashes and
drop fatigued against the sodden wall.
As I collapse into the tree
it gives way.
I scramble from a passage
the weight of our bodies opened.
Undistracted, Needle suckles.
I peer downward through a tunnel
leading under.
Nothing brightens
the black field. No absent light strays,
but just beyond the eye’s reach
a siren beam
scintillates the well, brightness measureless
as its absence.
A BIRDLESS REALM
When Needle sleeps again
I pull the shirt across my breasts
then draw him near and we belly down
winding narrow
among tree trunk and roots. Decay brown
warped and woofed with fungii, mosses,
the earthbound wood creeps leagues below.
Along the largest soil-branch
I inch down an interior mountain
crowded by dirt from every direction.
Sunless minerals press our ears
and eyes until we slide out beneath the mantle
to dangle from the clay sky
above the land of the dead.
I hold to this vantage, frail footing
above spectral activities;
intricate curls weave along one another
sloping and switching as souls circumambulate
dozens of centers. Each individual drawn along
by death’s continual repatterning.
Dim light from phosphorous streaks,
small oval bodies also inwardly
glow. I grab roots and rocks to climb
slipping. My sap filled hair clacks with amber globs.
Could I kill us by falling
into the land of the dead?
Each soul remains miniature to our gigantic bodies
disconcertingly large for the world here,
but this descent lasts hours
until the space between crevices
grows precariously distant.
Each time I scrape my arm
along the wall to balance I swing further out,
gauging gravity.
Kicked gravel falls.
The souls’ template has veered to chaotic wanderings
intersecting one another
as life-size fellows on the street.
Clinging to root hairs I call to them, “Help!”
A few look up with curiosity.
“That’s not the way,” one shouts,
“Enter from the river.”
Needle shifts beneath my left arm.
“No,” I call, “This is a visit.
We’re not here to stay.”
Scattered laughter suggests the unlikeliness
of a short trip to the underworld.
How long can I hold?
Myriad dead peer at our predicament.
We are too pink.
They have forgotten about emergencies.
At last, one industrious dead man hefts a ladder
lashed together from roots and twine.
Gratefully, tentatively, rung by rung,
backwards, I approach the lower ground.
On the tamped floor the brief swarm of people
ignores us. They attained average height
or we have grown miniscule.
Bustling phantoms avoid and disregard
two newly arrived flesh obstacles.
I thank the man who rescued us.
“No trouble,” he grumbles, “All in a day’s work.”
Needle begins the complex process
of yawning himself awake. After a minute
his slate blue eyes fix on mine.
We stare in open recognition;
my heart rushes near his ear,
the softness of his iris irises and skull.
We have both been torn away
from every home.
“The first place I brought you,” I say,
“Is the land of the dead.”
I hope it’s an honest beginning,
life given with result divulged
at the outset. “Sorry,” I whisper.
The industrious dead man removes his ladder,
carries it off.
We wait a moment in our circumstance,
unable to return to the surface at a whim.
I stop passersby to ask directions,
but no one knows the way up. “Where did you come from?”
a cop asks and I stammer, “Above.
I lived at the crossing.” Authority frowns.
I gesture to the root ceiling.
“Up there?” he questions.
I nod.
“Above the depth, you don’t say.”
“Yes. With the flowers and trees.”
THE DROWNED GIRL
Overhearing us, then ashamed for listening in,
a girl with black, braided hair and sopping skirts
patiently explains the impossibility
of directly up’s particular dimension
by explaining how many times she tried
to send a short note home, to apologize
for disobedience in drowning
and therefore being unable to return