Viva Voce
By Michael Blaine
We are born to response:
The warm viscous fluid, flushed from us.
When cold air and brightness contact --
create breath, become beating,
Our rebirth to vicinal experience
Cut of the cord, a line so long fixed
Then severed from another.
Here, God (with rigid capital letter)
Prepares for the vexatious child,
The first wonderment enfolding.
Spare the cord to spoil the child.
Pull the what is looseness taught,
what the physical becomes -- voice
from spaced distance drawn
(our later visceral draw to water)
to again bathe in saline.