7

Here I am, breached into this world, all twenty inches of me, all seven pounds, with all my features and appendages in their place. The downy mammalian hair that once covered my entire body is gone. I’m fully and independently human now, even if I haven’t yet taken my first breath.

To think that only nine months ago, I was a mere leech, the size of a grain of rice, clinging to my mother’s walls. And then a lump of flesh, pea-sized, formless and shapeless, just a week later. I was an inch, head and heart in place, limbs budding, when my mother decided to keep me. My urogenital folds had fused and extended out to form the spongy shaft of my penis, clarifying my boyhood, by the time my father rejected me. I was beginning to make my presence known, pushing out against my mother’s abdomen, when she first met her current lover.

Two days earlier, when my mother’s sister accepted guardianship of me, I was ready—my intestines already functioning, fashioning and storing what will be my first stool, black and tar-like, while my lungs, the most developed of my organs, lay compressed but ready to assume from my mother’s lungs the task of providing oxygen. I was as prepared as I’d ever be to leave behind the three shells that had protected me from the world’s harsh brilliance: the placenta that nourished me, the uterus that harbored me, the body that housed me.

When I emerged from my mother’s womb and the umbilical cord was severed, a reflex triggered by a hunger for air should have made me gasp, and I should have taken my first breath. My lungs, until now a crimped-up mass of solid tissue, would have then expanded with their first taste of air, and my blood would have begun to flow through them, to be renewed there. The respiratory muscles that line my rib cage and diaphragm would have become engaged, forcing me to take my second breath, and then my third.

But I don’t respond this way, and someone slips a suction tube into my mouth to clear my windpipe and induce me to start breathing. Someone else wipes me clean of the blood and mucus smearing my face and body. They thump me on the back—part encouragement, part prod—to shock my body into responding. My collapsed lungs resist, and someone places a mask over my nostrils to force air into me. My stubborn lungs strain with the pressure, but even as I convulse and splutter, they expand only slightly.

As if, by some grace, I’ve been given the power to choose whether I wish to enter this world or, by holding my breath, forsake it.

8

On a ship sailing from England to Italy, a poet despairs—a storm rages outside, and a storm rages within. He’s confined to his cabin in this wooden coffin taking him away from everything he loves. It’s not fame he lusts after anymore, nor the moon’s otherworldly beauty.