The last poem that I'm going to read from this collection
is a poem from the final section of the book, so
the new final section.
So the first final section was "The Study
for the End of the World," and then I
gave birth to my daughter, and I realized
that it doesn't end there, and that maybe nothing ends.
And so I wrote a series of beginning poems
in the first few weeks of her life, sort of furiously.
And a few of those poems made it into the collection.
So this is called, "To Be Born is the Supreme Loneliness."
They were hopeful, beautiful, uplifting poems to me
at the time, even though that doesn't sound like it.
"To be born is the supreme loneliness.
It is to wake alone for the first time, a simple form,
startled at its edges.
To be born is to be the first creature.
It is to be the beginning of knowledge, and therefore,
of desire.
To be born, to enter, is to already have required an exit.
It is to be the knot, so to speak,
at the end of one's own rope, the hand placed to the mouth
in lieu of the sustaining thing.
It is to be the simple repetition of object
and breath, the first languageless mouthing
at the proffered fist.
It is a supremely lonely thing.
It is not to be companionless, to be
without destiny or origin.
It is instead to exist like or as the world
into which one is continuously born,
as the soft hum of the bulb overhead,
as the tread of rubber soles back and forth
across the hospital floor.
It is to exist infinitely and all at once,
without limit or end, and all the same,
as if alone, as if a single thing.
To be born is to encounter, no, to become, this juncture,
to become the fold as a paper or cloth where
one side, in becoming the next, conceives
of itself as a folded thing.
To be born is to long suddenly to be born again,
for the next breath to be the last, the final and sustaining
thing, for the world to occur again, and all at once,
for light and sound to exist as they once
did with no difference between them,
for footsteps to travel, no longer back and forth,
but again, and at once, in all directions.
To be born is to discover and become one's own limit,
the body a shorthand, a simple gesture with which one
is required to describe, imperfectly,
that only for so long as it holds, the absent center."