The Museum of Being Born

I remember now. Something was chasing
blackbirds from my mouth. My hands
were willows or their speechless wives.

I remember morning like a feline thing
with a pelt gray-gloved as a mild girl's iris
or the sighing a highway does in its sleep.

Time grew bilingual. Roads so far along
the edge they were liquids still condensing.
The fog was graphite. The night B-flat.

I had a complexion and her sonnets matured
to wax. I burned fertile with the thought
of death. I ate from a dish of camphor.

I woke to each streetlamp's liquor
at the bottom of the glass, the cold,
ornate lateness the neon diseases to light.

How small my gallop away from the dark,
how the seeds have the smallest fingers
I have ever felt in my eyes wanting

their way out. And off in the distance,
pain, an anvil for beating mere mongrels
into elegant beasts. Too late,

the soft unlathing, the not-yet grief
of loons. Love, the roost of writhing.
Futility, my little alone.

Copyright © 2005 Jennifer Militello All rights reserved
from Gulf Coast
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission