Kauai

We’ve come back to the site of   her

conception. She calls it why

and cries all night,

sleepless, wild.

It seems the way is always

floating and the goal —

to live so the ghosts we were

don’t trail us and echo.

I think we are inside a flower,

under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.

The air pulses with perfume,

flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.

But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.

I am thinking, maybe

even coming into the soul

is a difficult birth, squeezed by the body’s vise.

My bent legs like pincers

or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower.

Even my mind gripped by the folds

of   the flesh, how the cells keep twinning

themselves out toward complexity.

The tulip trees of   the valley

spread their bone canopies into slick green leaves

and fire flowers deep as cups.

Their cups fill with rain, rain

drinks the leaves drinking rain.

I can’t begin to explain.

How on this porous peak of stone in the sea

our daughter came into me.

Little flick of a fish I could not see.

I was just learning to be human

and upright among all that life.

And what was real was stranger

than night with its dust of unnamed suns.

It was the beyond in us. And she was.