Whatever they would have you believe,
the kept gods and
their powdery vocabularies,
stewing in commotions of unclear motive;
I am the first substance, the first miracle.
Not the skin on skin, the nurses hovering,
slapping, scraping, encasing.
Not the chemicals, slick and eager.
Not the satellite
of the doctor who retrieves his face
from the birth canal
and turns away.
Not even the mother, cloven and delicate;
nor the mouth’s motions, which you
essayed so assiduously
those months in the floating realm.
Not the breath—
that which you already claimed as your own.
Rather, I arrive as your first visitor.
And like an apparition I swim briefly in your life,
my remedy proffered as opportunity:
take me in or don’t.
While you dreamed it all—
I took up temporary
shelter in the host, like a worme
or an uncorked champagne.
I throat the pleasure of the toast,
for to oil the gravity
of your passage. To bless your necessity,
I fling myself through
the pleading innocence of your
tongue. I ply past the trap door
to your tiny, pea-sized stomach.
Thimble-cupped,
copper-balmed, syrupy
and simple. I seed
the notion of survival into form.
In the first days, you require
so little of me.
And in return, I relinquish
myself fully for you, in minute
slips and dribbles,
I give myself over and
then I vanish.
For you, who won’t remember my taste.
For you, who hold the missiles and the missives
whole within your own mouth
and sink the weight of oceans in your refuse.
And yet
I like to think of it like this—
You slip me free of the last generation.
And thus I don’t concentrate my power in endings—
I, the original elixir,
sating all who permit my liminal solitudes.
