Waiting For My Adopted Daughter

I.

` ‘The moment a child is born,
the mother is also born.
She never existed before.
The woman existed, but the mother, never.
A mother is something absolutely new.’
Rajneesh

If I am new
as the next breath
or beat of blood,
if I am standing on the precipice,
toes curled around the edges,
flesh pricked and crawling
the ream of wind,
if I press against a
fetid shell, the cracked casing
that has been my home,
if I shrug it off and
abandon it, if I never look back
on my life as it were,
will you come

speak to her body in low tones,
ask her to open as my arms,
that are heavy with weighted air,
would she give her body up,
stretched, swollen temple of my child,
press you, a flattened flower
from the bed of her belly,
wash you with the slick salt of tears, would she
release you to the world,
a new song who clings
to my lips, and then lifts,
gently in prayer.

II.
‘The moment a child is born,
the mother is also born.
She never existed before.
The woman existed, but the mother, never.
A mother is something absolutely new.’
Rajneesh

to picture her as an orphan
folded into a corner of the home
of hope, where children are gumming the lead
from painted cribs, padding shoeless through halls

like thoughts that are born and then slip,
as if they had never existed,
through narrow slots in the mind.
to see you,

with your beautiful, round bloom,
pushed out like an Aster Moon,
smooth black skin stretched
and floating, like lilies, on the lake of womb.

I feel as the other, the anti-, the crawl
of fear across the ribs before a stranger
appears in shadow. A thief with small
hands that are always swiftly signing

even after you have lain down and shaken
the house with your screams.
your eyes darting like a cornered animal,
skin glossed and dripping,

breath caged in the drum of your chest,
the bearing down of,
the moment when finally
the body opens and empties.

you will see her, this creature that is you
and is your body, and is new as the hollowed
case of your body, and you will say to her,
how can I ever give my body away?