I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

Nothing today hasn’t happened before: 
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him, 
fed him, left him to his cage for the day 
closing just now. My eye drifts 
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling, 
as they do, in a late fall light that melts 
against the turning oak and smelts 
its leaves bronze. 
                             Before you left, 
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face; 
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse 
against my own, your scent familiar 
as a thousand evenings. 
                                       Another time, 
I might have dismissed as hunger 
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing, 
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company 
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling, 
supple, misses the wind.

Was it odd to be born?

Was it odd to be born 
when women wore rick-rack

& the sun was a bracelet of yes? 
  
When wind bent dandelions in puffy winglets, 
& wisdom did raise her voice & not say weed &

when the toad did raise its spikes at the same time 
                 as federal codes 
                      & the try-to-be-perfect raised its voice?

Did the clang of copper collectors & the too-many lawns 
                 begin in Arizona
 
while peel-paint steeples rose over dirt for the prism 
                                  of progress, 
            
                 minerals torn from mines with no mouths
but you had a mouth & sang early?

When nuclear testing began north of love
& the Remington computer was placed in office use,

when there was just as much beauty & sex as later,
while some lay down at drive-ins in Chevies on seats
                        the color of crushed 
                 berries & phone calls went up to a dime?

When Congress loaned money to countries because their grains had 
ancient fungus claviceps purpuria that caused 
          visions & swelling 
under the silent claw of the predator?

Was shame in you born before beauty? 
Was beauty was shame was beauty?

As white gravel spread under the white churches 
as silver sequins on danceless 
dresses tacked on each
                  “hanging by a thread”

                         like drops of sweat on horses at the city’s edge

while downcast daisies were mimicked on sisterly aprons 
       catching sugars from women making pudding from boxes 
                                  under swamp coolers

 with slightly mildewy pads in a breeze 
                      created for doing housework by yourself? 
  
Was it odd to be born when two 
types of purslane in the west were called weed, 
even agave used to make soap, 
though it was home to the yucca moth, central & sweet, its

terminal clusters piercing thunderheads over red pick-up trucks,

& lowly dogbane hiding from developers with sibling roots 
     of fungi with  “no downsides to pesticides”
                & florets like diamond periods on certain fonts           
                                                  also were called weed?

Was it odd to be born near hillsides with radars
         like baby ears of question marks 
                        
     under the silent claw of the predator,   
when mountains shook toward sabino canyons

& there was Jello salad at picnics?

Here from this century can you say
                 was it wild to be born?

Was there anything else like this, anything at all?