Say the dream isn't a dream.
Say your birth is a random piecing together
of limbs that fall out of the sky
one clear summer night.
*
Your limbs float on a sea,
pieces of a puzzle; it's easy to mistake
the right arm for the left, the left leg for the right,
but this isn't something you try out.
Like suicide this is something you want
to get right the first time.
*
Your body comes together,
to what you call a stump,
because your head is missing,
your head and its mindless buoyancy
drifting away to some other cause,
an abortion or miscarriage--
but back it comes, riding a wave
from the spot the sea realized
the human mind cannot alone
be its own entity.
*
In the morning the warmth of the sun
wakes you. Waves pound the shore
like an endless wheel of fists. You stand up, naked,
glistening. And as you take your first steps away
from your mother the sea, you shiver
at what you notice first, what you notice last on the ground:
on the wet sand, your body's seamless integrity,
on the dry sand, your shadow, your bodily dark.
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