Rachel Jamison Webster

In the seam between day and night, wind ruts the dirt road and ruffles the milky way of dandelions. The young among them are greasy gold and urgent, while the old are balanced between growth and that burst past growing—annihilation, culmination of a beginning each has always been ending toward, admitting more and more space, until what's left is beyond color, a bleary truss of matter and air. Shocked accomplice of the rounding light, how you tremble in the stretch of your death, which is like all deaths, geometric with seed. Wind-swimmer, eye-floater, white nightgowned grandmother dancing your platelets on the head of this pin, can you show me how to wish, how to gather and scatter this single hooped breath?

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 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.

Inward lush unpetaling purpose in pink blooms of sleep, and I no longer needed to be separate. I was living there then, at the edge of the sea. And my friends came to visit, trying for a baby, not sure how to read me on that island of dozy sunlight. And there it was: familiarity edged with fear, the way we’d feed each other sandwiches and wonder if we should have wanted something other. We walked the folded cliffs over conifer fronds and mud runneling rocks slick with dropped fruit and rotting camellias to pause at the first ridge. We looked through high pines at the blue moving tides, then his finger caught a snag in the water and another and we saw — glinting fins wheeling the sheen, thousands playing in pods coming closer like the souls slippering into our bodies, attaching to matter as flippers angle into a ferrying strand. We too are a species, I realized. We too could know that as joy.