The world is round.
I began this side of life as infant photographer,
focusing with the moving middle eye, the round umbilical
cord where it melded into the body center
like a vacuum sucking in the sights.
Not with any eye but with skin did I see this.
Do I remember now?
The skin can so remember.
This picture that I first took of touch here
in the studio body of birth first photograph of feeling
anchored by something other than the liquid albumin world where
I had lived from the first.
Something round made of me and her and him,
something akin to one large ballooning finger, here
at the full lips of my belly's button
where I could feel the warmth of food, milky brown thick sugar
passing from her body's oven into my whole wheat capsule.
Too quick and the vacuum cord yanked, tugged me yet
another way and I twist twirled around
in my curved world falling back asleep,
genuflected by her soft snaking octopus arm.
Only one hour old and I remember unlatching my eyes
to see the tiny incubating opening where I'd already
lived for a week, the warm stale air pouring in on me.
Not with my mind but with full body
camera do I remember this, the perfect circular opening,
round just like the end beginning of the cord, round
like the camera's eye that I would one day accidentally
flutter inside of, discovering silky stems
of wildebeest poems growing sour, sweet filigree words.
I always return to the glove of her body,
the touch of her cord to my middle, my middle to her cord,
that opening where I first fell in love
with the breast of the garment, first
recognized what fit though I could not yet safely wear it
down the daylight street.
I can't show you any photographs of this
to prove what I'm telling you is true.
I am remembering this not with my mind but with my body.
The body can so remember what long ago
left the accidental scene of the eye.