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37 Kauai We’ve come back to the site of her conception. She calls it why and cries all night, sleepless, wild. It seems the way is always floating and the goal— to live so the ghosts we were don’t trail us and echo. I think we are inside a flower, under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand. The air pulses with perfume, flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air. But my eyes are thin and elsewhere. I am thinking, maybe even coming into the soul is a difficult birth, squeezed by the body’s vise. My bent legs like pincers or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower. Even my mind gripped by the folds of the flesh, how the cells keep twinning themselves out toward complexity. The tulip trees of the valley 38 spread their bone canopies into slick green leaves and fire flowers deep as cups. Their cups fill with rain, rain drinks the leaves drinking rain. I can’t begin to explain. How on this porous peak of stone in the sea our daughter came into me. Little flick of a fish I could not see. I was just learning to be human and upright among all that life. And what was real was stranger than night with its dust of unnamed suns. It was the beyond in us. And she was. ...

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