To be born

On Saturday,
you learned to laugh, startled me
with the sudden leap to this voicing,
how the joy was in your whole body,
kicking and kicking on your blue elephant linen,
the way you did before you were born

and for a moment I was there with you
in the womb, that pocket of the infinite, and
it was not quiet but adrenaline-pumped,
a hissing rush and thrum of blood all around
speedways and the kick-drum rhumba
of new limbs rushing tumbling swim
kick and pull, kick and pull, full
of currents and reaching
and urgent promise.

Saturday is when I learned
a womb is not a round warm well at all,
it is a high, high mountain, and birth
is the urge to leap into its mysteries,
life, the seduction of gravity,
how Earth plies us with her puckish horizons,
like standing at the edge of the Grand
Canyon, compelled to jump, to fill it
with our being, feeling the pull in
the back of our brain, how the push
is in our whole body, the will to jump,
to be born into the bright brilliant air.