Where We Begin & other poems

Where We Begin

“An infant doesn’t know where it ends and its mother begins. To the baby, the two are one — like the salt and the sea.” —Emiko Jean, Mika in Real Life

even so, we begin with separation

mother and baby born by parting

as quick as a breath

as slow as the parsing of organs

the muscular removal of a little body alive

to stay together means not to begin living

to begin living is a separation

when my daughter was born I separated

skin from skin, nerve from nerve

once separated I was reassembled

reassembled while in another room nurses examined her

her body on her father’s chest in her introduction to human skin

my skin separated and sewn back together

I had to relearn how to feel

a new closeness after cleaving

only skin separating us from everything

the membranes of eggs

a universe in a warm sea

when my daughter was born she looked like my mother

my mother said she looked like her father, my grandfather

who grew up close to the sea before he left it

before my mother left him by crossing it

here in my daughter’s face the family reunites 

and then she makes it her own

The Garden

Every morning, I part

your hair. A pale river tracing

the halves of you, a newly

sprouting garden. We try

space buns, giraffe buns,

one sprout, two sprouts, four.

I learn the insistent habits

of your hair, where it resists

the path of the comb. It is so easy

to love you the way you are.

Pink hair tie, green. Straight lines meet,

encircle. The task is the practice,

gathering you up and letting you go.

The last two northern white rhinos on earth are a mother and daughter at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park

Note: This poem appears below in two forms. The first is a conventional, typed poem. The second shows how the poem was born, as an accidental collaboration with my two-year-old daughter. I had tried writing different versions of this poem before, after seeing the namesake rhinos in person, but I didn’t feel quite happy with my attempts. Then, I had the idea to impose a shape on the poem, and I sketched it in a notebook. My daughter found my notebook and started drawing in it, and when she reached this page, she somehow only drew on the shape of the baby rhino. I took this as an invitation to collaborate and commit a version of the poem to the page.

How do I raise you to live

without me? Our days

are an intimate choreography

of limbs. Yours lengthen

before we are ready, and I am

already struggling to hold you.

How do I make mine a love

that does not seek to

possess? To accept the

accelerating goodbye?

I think to survive the end

you must make your love

expansive. Big enough

to find a lover in the grass

and a mother in the moon.

Big enough to let the earth

rock you to sleep.