Havana Birth

Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning

of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather

straps and watch the sky while three couples

who have been dancing on the deck of a ship

in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss

each other's cheeks and call it a night.

On a green sofa five dresses wait

to be fitted. The seamstress kneeling at Mother's feet

has no idea I am about to be born. Mother

pats her stomach which is flat

as the lace mats on the dressmaker's table. She thinks

I'm playing in my room. But as usual, she's wrong.

I'm about to be born in a park in Havana. Oh,

this is important, everything in the dressmaker's house

is furred like a cat. And Havana leans right up

against the windows. In the park, the air

is chocolate, the sweet breath of a man

smoking an expensive cigar. The grass

is drinkable, dazzling, white. In a moment

I'll get up from a bench, lured

by a flock of pigeons, lazily sipping

the same syrupy music through a straw.

Mother is so ignorant, she thinks

I'm rolled like a ball of yarn under the bed. What

does she know of how I got trapped in my life?

She thinks it's all behind her, the bloody

sheets, the mirror in the ceiling

where I opened such a sudden furious blue, her eyes

bruised shut like mine. The pigeon's eyes

are orange, unblinking, a doll's. Mother always said

I wanted to touch everything because

I was a child. But I was younger than that.

I was so young I thought whatever I

wanted, the world wanted too. Workers

in the fields wanted the glint of sun on their machetes.

Sugarcane came naturally sweet, you

had only to lick the earth where it grew.

The music I heard each night outside

my window lived in the mouth of a bird. I was so young

I thought it was easy as walking

into the ocean which always had room

for my body. So when I held out my hands

I expected the pigeon to float between them

like a blossom, dusting my fingers with the manna

of its wings. But the world is wily, and doesn't want

to be held for long, which is why

as my hands reached out, workers lay down

their machetes and left the fields, which is why

a prostitute in a little calle of Havana dreamed

the world was a peach and flicked

open a knife. And Mother, startled, shook

out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt

across the front, as if she had fallen

chasing after me in the rain. But what could I do?

I was about to be born, I was about to have

my hair combed into the new music

everyone was singing. The dressmaker sang it, her mouth

filled with pins. The butcher sang it and wiped

blood on his apron. Mother sang it and thought her body

was leaving her body. And when I tried

I was so young the music beat right

through me, which is how the pigeon got away.

The song the world sings day after day

isn't made of feathers, and the song a bird pours

itself into is tough as a branch

growing with the singer and the singer's delight.

Source: Rapture (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992)