As I Descend, My Mother Calls a Taxi

Like a ball of light I fall, all energy 
no head, arms, or legs; no blood or a body; 
I float like an idea, hydrogen and helium, 
rolling through the atmosphere 
into a cell, from the wall of an ovary 
into a sac, like a pearl into my mother’s 
pocket, where I begin to sculpt 
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen,
two eyes into the sockets of bone, 
membranes into matter; I sleep for seasons 
like a god, phosphorus in the vastness 
of time, forgetting how the stars 
ejected me, that I was older than the sun;
until the mid-March rain wakes me 
tapping on the apartment window, 
my mother’s voice muffled on the telephone; 
I am opening and softening, 
stretching and burning, turning into a rush 
of water, descending, becoming 
my mother’s breath in the backseat of a taxi, 
moving through the passage of cervix,
until the crown of my head glows in red streaks, 
and consciousness breathes upon me; 
I am gasping, as if gravity sucked me 
from the space dust onto the table, 
looking at the tiny hands I had created, 
the atoms of my skin vibrating still, 
until my eyes adjust to the light.