The door rattles. Blast of pain, and past
the pear-white chill of the birth ward bustles

this odd shadow down my legs and away.
Wet hair styled stiff by the minute’s ladle—

you are here and growing to the naked eye new
dizzy space in your lungs. Rigging the topsail

nailsbreadth at a time. Your nails
clear and tiny, row of ellipses erased.

I knew I’d see my insides on your outsides,
how you’ve been smeared and tossed

like old-time typeset text, like sex …
I knew I’d forgive my body telling all,

as billions had, and also want forgotten
all that spilled ink. Find you neater

genesis than that. A story of a stork—
I see why that’s been done before—

the plausible pinch and pinion
when the door swats minutes off like flies,

and off you go for the life you spent hours
clacking backwards into.

Like new worlds where height flows
in one direction only, as time does here

on Earth, such that once traversed, that perch
can’t be chirped upon again. There are places

you can’t go back to, even if the site remains,
even if the gift of you is storked against

the doorstep where we found you in
the footpath of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday,

the day I took piano lessons as a child,
day of learning over and over to loosen

my shoulders so the sound came down
with greater say over piano or forte, from the whole

body’s choice and not just its outer limits.
You are tuned to a pitch that in this dimension

flows just one way, like time, a note that won’t
be struck again, belonging to an axis of well-tempered

fingers plucking at the air with bated strings.
Like typeset text you rattle with the news, or knew

at once on arrival that setting nowise binds you,
only smears a moment’s pigment on a message

changed the more the head line calls for checks
of facts, the more it’s recounted and columned,

pressed into held folds, the more

you’re here.