Havana Birth

Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On a green sofa five dresses wait to be fitted. The seamstress kneeling at Mother's feet has no idea I am about to be born. Mother pats her stomach which is flat as the lace mats on the dressmaker's table. She thinks I'm playing in my room. But as usual, she's wrong. I'm about to be born in a park in Havana. Oh, this is important, everything in the dressmaker's house is furred like a cat. And Havana leans right up against the windows. In the park, the air is chocolate, the sweet breath of a man smoking an expensive cigar. The grass is drinkable, dazzling, white. In a moment I'll get up from a bench, lured by a flock of pigeons, lazily sipping the same syrupy music through a straw. Mother is so ignorant, she thinks I'm rolled like a ball of yarn under the bed. What does she know of how I got trapped in my life? She thinks it's all behind her, the bloody sheets, the mirror in the ceiling where I opened such a sudden furious blue, her eyes bruised shut like mine. The pigeon's eyes are orange, unblinking, a doll's. Mother always said I wanted to touch everything because I was a child. But I was younger than that. I was so young I thought whatever I wanted, the world wanted too. Workers in the fields wanted the glint of sun on their machetes. Sugarcane came naturally sweet, you had only to lick the earth where it grew. The music I heard each night outside my window lived in the mouth of a bird. I was so young I thought it was easy as walking into the ocean which always had room for my body. So when I held out my hands I expected the pigeon to float between them like a blossom, dusting my fingers with the manna of its wings. But the world is wily, and doesn't want to be held for long, which is why as my hands reached out, workers lay down their machetes and left the fields, which is why a prostitute in a little calle of Havana dreamed the world was a peach and flicked open a knife. And Mother, startled, shook out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt across the front, as if she had fallen chasing after me in the rain. But what could I do? I was about to be born, I was about to have my hair combed into the new music everyone was singing. The dressmaker sang it, her mouth filled with pins. The butcher sang it and wiped blood on his apron. Mother sang it and thought her body was leaving her body. And when I tried I was so young the music beat right through me, which is how the pigeon got away. The song the world sings day after day isn't made of feathers, and the song a bird pours itself into is tough as a branch growing with the singer and the singer's delight.