Closing the Third Trimester

Closing the Third Trimester

 

Endowed, not so much with birthing hips,

            But well-enough, nonetheless,
I dilate, and push; the walls of my innards
            Flexing in painful waves.
Otherwise blessed with the gene, the one
            That makes my womb barren,
That makes my womb a myth:
            Nonexistent.
 
And, yet, birth I give, to a bouncing work,
            A perfect: A spirit: A soul.
Conceived from an unrepentant ether,
            Snatched from moments,
Uncounted among progeny, yet living,
            Bravely, fists clenched, and
Page-turning in wrinkled time:
            Omnipresent.
 
Son of Washington and Whitman,
Son of Eliot and Proust,
Son of Plato, Virgil, and Wilde,
Foucault, Melville, and Mann,
And Stein and Woolf,
And Vidal and Navratilova(?),
And Jean-Baptiste,
            And Jesus Christ.
 
Perched between clavicle and crown,
            Gravity-centered higher
Than most might expect for a carnal being,
            For a human being whose lower
Two-thirds might otherwise work, and
            In whose primal needs beauty beats,
I project into a vast and hungry ether:
            Umbilical.
 
Freak, mutant, next in line to the throne,
            New race, or is it species?
Or, is it really next in the long line passed
            From mind to mind, heart to heart,
Along a different path, consummated upon
            Different hips, made for strength,
Different strength, borne of a different womb:
            Momentitious.