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this is what rapture feels like
Unborn Child Elegy
Tell me a story
________________whispers my always unborn child
and I pause, listening. Whenever a word
shapes itself outward in speech
there's a hush.
________________In the beginning, I tell her, nothing -
if you can imagine nothing. Just so, and patiently, the ancient
stories begin.
________________Once, lying down in the backseat of my parents'
car - their heads dark on the windshield, telephone poles
outside and the heads of trees blown back against the stars -
I tried to imagine nothing. Warm air rushed on my eyes
erasing the car, the trees, the stars. I inched across
a bridge of thread called emptiness, cold.
Then I knew you were there inside,
asleep in one of the body's seedbeds.
I could hold my breath and find
you, small as a syllable,
a grain like pearled barley in the hourglass of my brain,
a stitch in my side.
We made a pact. I'd bring you the world inside,
the moon your heart,
a dark plum your eyesight.
You'd bring me so close to the unspoken I'd shake,
some of the mystery spilling like salt.
Today snow sparks the air like mica - the sun's
just so, cocked right angles to the wind.
I bring you the snow and it isn't enough.
You whisper you want to be born.
I study your whisper, I study my fear.
You're bound, my mother said, to pain.
Each child pries you open.
No one will believe
how alive and present to me you are if I refuse
you a body. But I believe in nothing, a transparent
breath from which all form and color rise
in a passion of wings and leaves.
In the ancient stories, the world begins by surprise
when zero speaks, from mere words
weaving sun and moon, the fire
one flash of snow.
Be the zero who speaks for me.
Be birth and death, the emptiness
only a child, and never a child, can fill.
(-Margaret Gibson)
Tell me a story
________________whispers my always unborn child
and I pause, listening. Whenever a word
shapes itself outward in speech
there's a hush.
________________In the beginning, I tell her, nothing -
if you can imagine nothing. Just so, and patiently, the ancient
stories begin.
________________Once, lying down in the backseat of my parents'
car - their heads dark on the windshield, telephone poles
outside and the heads of trees blown back against the stars -
I tried to imagine nothing. Warm air rushed on my eyes
erasing the car, the trees, the stars. I inched across
a bridge of thread called emptiness, cold.
Then I knew you were there inside,
asleep in one of the body's seedbeds.
I could hold my breath and find
you, small as a syllable,
a grain like pearled barley in the hourglass of my brain,
a stitch in my side.
We made a pact. I'd bring you the world inside,
the moon your heart,
a dark plum your eyesight.
You'd bring me so close to the unspoken I'd shake,
some of the mystery spilling like salt.
Today snow sparks the air like mica - the sun's
just so, cocked right angles to the wind.
I bring you the snow and it isn't enough.
You whisper you want to be born.
I study your whisper, I study my fear.
You're bound, my mother said, to pain.
Each child pries you open.
No one will believe
how alive and present to me you are if I refuse
you a body. But I believe in nothing, a transparent
breath from which all form and color rise
in a passion of wings and leaves.
In the ancient stories, the world begins by surprise
when zero speaks, from mere words
weaving sun and moon, the fire
one flash of snow.
Be the zero who speaks for me.
Be birth and death, the emptiness
only a child, and never a child, can fill.
(-Margaret Gibson)