At the hour of my conception
a taxi was idling in front of an airport
awaiting the passenger with her carry-on luggage.
In the airport bar a waitress
tiredly wiped down tables after the evening shift:
water glass rings, full ashtrays.
January, and the last Canada geese escaping toward the tropics,
honking and crying, their necks extended into the future air.
It was ten years after the last big war.
Men who had liberated concentration camps
were home now, with their nightmares and shiny new cars.
My mother took off her apron,
her dress, unfastened her garter belt with its rubbery snaps.
My father finished brushing his teeth, his pajamas loose on his lanky boy frame.
Younger than I am now,
or have ever been, impossibly young,
the world being younger, despite what had been recently learned
about human horror, still--the innocence of them.
I hovered at the window, an unclothed soul,
my breath a fog of invisible ice.
Angels around me cried in their high voices,
"Oh child, don't go!
You will enter in fear and depart in agony,
all the while subject to unendurable longing.
Worms will nibble your brightness,
the tigers of loneliness tear you open,
minnows of trivia devour your days with worry.
Your heart will be a drum of fate, beating senselessly, out of control...
your heart, oh! think
how it will hurt you."
And I said,
"Worms? Minnows? Tigers? Music?"
And dove through the darkened pane
just as her hand reached out to draw the curtains.
Originally published in The Sun
