Birth
Birth expands into the world
bathed in cries

blows a trumpet
to announce the divine

escalates
a human being

across the bandwidth
of the universe.


Birth unwinds
the pattern of a name

finds love
as creation is pain

only wants
to run with it

trembling
on a slender dew point.


Birth is a song
for each life

takes a kiss
and parts the sea

into
shoreline

delivered with a bow
when its done.

Daughter of Wind and Water 

Name Refrain
My heart contains an extra chamber
where I hide my name from the tide,
the only thing left to me
from the old days. Mine
until I swim the channel.

Named after a grandmother I never knew,
a sound translated from Hungarian into English,
picked by Edgar Allen Poe
whose Raven my mother recited at bed-time,
a solid thing that cast no shadow.

She didn't allow me a nickname.
I stayed who I was,
a girl who spoke to stray dogs on the run.
I see with the brown flecks
of my mother's green eyes,

I'm my father's voice in the shower,
my father who ripped across the Atlantic at such speed,
he diverted the current,
and my mother's attention
from bridling sea-horses with seaweed.

My parents wait for me to swim
past the weekend and beyond the bridge
where seagulls fly above water
looking for a drifting name,
any easy target for them to pick off.

Death Valley, April 2005 

Prayer to Death Valley
1.
The desert blooms gold in the spring
where I've come to make a pilgrimage
after years of living in cities.

All I hear is expanse.

Blooms yellow gold with purple mats
spreading across the desert floor
like a beautiful contagion.

I stand below sea level
on a skating pond of salt
looking out on two tectonic plates
and so want to catch it,

the way a flower struts its stuff
on a shelf of rock.

Change me.
Make me new.

2.
All I hear is expanse.

Long ago,
near Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx,
I strolled with my doll, Judy,
along a slate pavement.

I remember how she smelled
when I first opened her box,
like a bird with the scent
of cut grass on its wing.

She had an alluvial fan of brown hair.

I loved her so much.
When her sawdust brains poured
into my hand,
my mother bought
new dolls to take her place
with clothes, and some could talk.

Imposters.

I vowed silence
until I found out
what had gone wrong,
flew back
to the only place where trees grew
in my borough, Pelham Bay Park.


3.
All I hear is expanse.

I've seen people
walk through a revolving door
to find air conditioning
on a long afternoon
exhausted by heat,
looking for water.

The dead cannot be replaced,
only remembered.

It's creation we know nothing about.


4.
Valley, uplift this daughter.
Fold together my pain.
Change me.
Make me new.

Show me the terrible place where love comes from.