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New Born Exam
by Mira McEwan

You are unwrapped and placed on the table, a gift.
Wild-eyed, your parents survey and appraise you
as you are weighed and measured, your reflexes
tested, straining against a love both fierce and simple.
You are amphibious still, your skin tender and
translucent like a breast, organs
partway visible. Your spirit flickers, speaks
insistently through your desire. Soul essence within
and without meets and mingles, this moment of touch
invisible to the eye, marked by a gasp of inspiration.
Your rapidly-beating heart and rhythmic breath, a
groundswell of feeling, the whistling silk of damp roses
opening. I hold you in my hands, lift you up to my face and
breathe. Cloves. Rainwater. Sweet grass.

She is learning the intermingling dance language of
being human. Her hands fluttering together and apart
like mating butterflies laces with my hand, grabs
my finger. Her body a twig of willow,
yielding, bending, twisting, bowing, and unbreaking.
Each moment closer to essence sensing a
little grace familiar, the tears in her eyes
making us appear dewy and luminous.

In time she will ossify and rise to the upper ether of
yearning, rest in the place where longing catches and
collects, melting and swelling against walls, against
choking sounds and silence. She will run from other
people’s demons and dissatisfied ghosts, living and dying
in slow pieces, migrating in and out of a continuous
series of small tragedies, the whole of her life hiding
and revealing the startling presence of truth, a carrion
bird perched on the edge of a windowsill.

Perhaps she will learn that there is nothing holding
an idea but will, and that each act performed by the
body must hold within it a sacred seed of giving, that
everything alive has thorns. Perhaps she will rest in the
simple persistent fact of loneliness, and understand
that life is sleight-of-hand and the gray secrecy of time made
glamorous with so much science and lying, and that
falling in love is the most ruthless trick there is, that life
is a smoky glass pane, daring and teasing one to look
inside but making everything thick and distorted.
Perhaps then she will fulfill her life’s purpose, to do
nothing, to do it well, to seek without seeking, to relinquish
some of the terrifying darkness she carries within her.

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