Before Birth

Before Birth

down
the cupola stairs
crane estate
ipswich, mass

Maybe there’re all laid out

in front of us before we’re born:

Choices,

of how:

we’ll learn to walk and whose

hands we’ll clutch and what

word we’ll say first and in what

language.  Or the day we’ll

taste our first flavor and say

(even if we’ve only a few

words in our treasure) sweet

and good or bitter, not.  Maybe

it’s a banquet of choices

left out on buffet tables

and the first course is

served cold so we won’t rush

the line and knock over

the sauces, all those OH!

tops we can pour over

the already gold to guild it

more or the already bad

to make it takeable.  And all

those spaces inbetween

courses, the sighs of our

impatience

and the pitch of our

entitlement

or the way we’ll be given

to wait in any line and the temper-

ment of that waiting:

by the time the night is over

we have our whole life in front of us

and even then it’s not

until we’re hurried to the door

of almost being born and already

we’re weighed down with our life

and everything we’ll choose

to do (though a few among us

will refuse and be taken away

but where is away in this place?)

and the last thing

in the course, the almost brushed

off almost forgotten, is our manner

of death and it’s given to us

in a small trinket box and we’re

given a glimpse

of what it must’ve been like

for Pandora because we’re scolded

not to look, not to lift the lid

because if we did—well it’s not that

fruit you’ll come to read about

and the husband and wife with

the juice of their knowing coming

down their chin, this time, if

the lid is lifted it will kill, even

enough to make what of you stays

together in a place like this

come undone, you’ll just not be,

like you were and then you weren’t

it will be dying but it won’t be

because the glow, the light of someone

else’s heart is not, and the causes

won’t go down in some manual,

  

your life is naught

because your death is naught

and so we don’t if we’ve got sense

and we float out into the cold

and wait to be called down into

a body and the pearl in our box

is warmed in the palm of what will

become, after all that stitching

in the liquid womb, our hand,

our precious bone tendon skin

finger hand and everything it will touch

without letting go

of that ending for us though how?

how could we know, not opening,

how could we

know?