The Adopted Woman Gives Birth
I come from women and men
whom I know about as well as I know
Circe and the King of Thebes. And I don't know
any of their spells. My daughter,
I know. They ran a finger
around the inside of my cervix
to start the labor. I pictured
the cervix as a ring and
the length of the mid-wife's finger
sliding around it.
Thus my daughter was
born into a year of cicada,
its rattle and shiver.
Now she is almost 17. The cicada
have come back to buzz
and shake. This young woman
has hair like a tornado.
Those others before me
were Odysseus’s men,
the sirens, the lotus-eaters,
people who got lost.
I came from them, I know that.
But I have strapped
myself to the mast.
She and I: we live here.
