Conception

Conception

You were made in the desert in a car with the windows down

About an hour after sunset, as quiet as a mango pit

Save the panting engine from a long drive in

Your mother and I steaming. We had no idea it would work

It was not supposed to be. In Death Valley, in a Volkswagen

In an engulfing space, the lowest place on Earth

Hundred and nineteen in the sun. Gas was four bucks, we gasped

Out the windows, copulating in our petri dish under the vast

Dome of sky, nothing but minimal specks by which to grasp

Not like it’s supposed to be. We were afraid of the silence

You know, those desert homicides, pickup with lights dimmed

Who knew we’d create a storm called you

Those days I thought the heart was more a muscle than an organ

How it would grow in a sea of dad, landscape of petty and urge

Flashflooding the highway, depositing love far and deep

At night, if one is quiet, when the windows are wide

Still a little fear.   How irony, in its expansiveness

And a little lust brought you here

There is a tiny fish that lives only in Death Valley              

Ironically, created in a cave, in waters sparse and dank   

Not in the seas, but in California’s deep perdition

Listen to your mother and I breathing you into being

This is your pulse, your desert, all the water that you need

To evolve in your own unlikely shallows