Which is just this – flesh.
The rest: lessons learned from literature.

I grew in my dying mother. I grew
From the absence of my dying father,

Who lost himself in a milky instant
When he gave to life thinking

He was giving to himself,
Unaware he had forfeited everything.

(The fall can only be Adam’s,
An ignorant but intuitively resentful man.)

The lake on a clear night
Mirrors an infinite sky,

Iron and frightening.
Hurting you and being hurt by you

Always made me feel more certain,
The flesh feeling words

But also healing from them
As it can from teeth and knives.

Sometimes I think I could forgive everything.
When the earth stains the soles of my feet

They shed their skin and begin again.
Yet there is a baby under the sand

And a husband under the sea,
And there are these stone walls

Within which I live haunted
Not by death but by life,

Which wants nothing
But to keep on being born.