Geburt des Monicakinds

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table

Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare

Of electric lights and a strange arranged

Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.

I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters

On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.

I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,

Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face

Which did not yet know struggle, burden;

How the look of newborns unnerves. Then

They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun

Still too small to throw up into the sky.

It was midnight when they injected me

With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox

Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth

Saying, these. Now it was contracted to a drop:

And in the morning I knew both death and life.

Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my

Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like

Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads

Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.

Source: Beasts of the Chase (Sarabande Books, 2008)