Animalia

it's not a perfect science

She wasn’t even a red cabbage yet
when we chose her lullaby
and practiced it in harmony all spring
walking slowly down Latimer Road
palms on curved belly
voices muffled in paper masks

I drew a scene of woods and whales and reeds
and swooping owls
and hung it where her crib could see it
right above the shelves of holy books
of barefoot scamps in rolled up pants
in rockweed-bearded tidepools
and rogue great-aunts with wiry buns
and pockets spilling lupines

Their pages as in bas relief
a slip-cast mold to shape her soul
and seep damp moss and balsam needles
dream-deep in her marrow

And then she came out flailing
like a beached fish treading air
her tender head indecent
still unzipped at the seams
blind beyond the shallow orbit of my face
leaking borrowed joules of warmth
her eyelids still fused shut
locked in a twilit eigengrau

And at that very moment
on this same midsummer night
somewhere close to the equator
on the dunes of Maho Bay
a clutch of ounceling turtles
cracked open their eggshells
untucked their still-soft bodies
and surfed the cooling sand slopes
down to the foamy brink of the world

And down the canyon on Ballona
new day-old downy goslings
still barely dried and fluffed
were waterborne and paddling
single file across the deep

And the cowlicked newborn fawn
I’d startled just that morning
from its makeshift shrubby bed
who’d wobbled up on toothpick shins
like quaking, cornered prey
was even now alighting
in a blaze of graceful grand jetés

And then there’s you
still gathering
like the frisson before lightning
testing wires between realms
nearly grounded
and just now prickling the neck

Studying shadows on the cave wall
and swallowing down the seawater
of strangers’ darkest queries
your gullet gaped
ballooning like a humpback’s pleated throat
and suckling
from the words we write
postpartum infinitum