The World Is Round: Poems

The World Is Round: The Breast of the Garment Measured

3 The World Is round: The BreasT of The GarmenT measured 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 albumen 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 own 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 cord, round like the camera’s eye, that I would one day accidentally 4 flutter inside, discovering silky stems of wildebeest poems growing, sour sweet filigree weeds. I always return to the glove of her body, the touch of her chord to my middle, my middle to her chord, 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. A woman has to be a daughter before she can be any kind of a woman. If she doesn’t have that in mind, if she doesn’t know how to relate to her ancestors, to her tribe, she is not good for much. —toni morrison ...