Slide Mantra

Noguchi called it remembering his travels
  to the naked-eye observatories at Jaipur
& Delhi — those architectural marvels

of brick rubble & lime plaster: their arched
  apertures, measured quadrants,
staircased sundials casting gnomon-shadow

while nightly inviting visitors to stargaze.
  A “birthing experience,” he described,
at 82, riding the marble curve — its twist

tying a figure nine — after installing
  at the Venice Biennale the stone slide,
one of his final works. Standing before

the maquette, I see treble clef, an alginate
  mold for dentures. An older father
& unsure if I still know how to play,

I am studying the imagined playgrounds,
  wondering what my mantra might be.
From slot canyons, winter’s Santa Anas

shook the windbreak of old eucalyptus
  the night you were born. Maternity was
at capacity — abrupt changes in air pressure

triggered by the strong gusts, the night
  nurses explained, cause a mother’s waters
to break. A slide is a mountain’s slope

rockfall, & scree. Noguchi’s is both
  a slash mark’s caesura & an ampersand’s
aggregate speed. You came wet, a mix

of blood & vernix, & with your soft spot
  on a still-forming head. How assuredly male,
I think now, how modern to tugboat

the tons of Carrara marble alongside
  the Grand Canal’s taxiing gondolas,
then fashion something so white,

so pristine. You came despite your tía
  telling your mother those first contractions
were probably just gas. You came after hours

at home, your mother laboring from sofa
  to bed to shower to Prius — crowning then
in triage before nurses could Covid test

or assign us a bed. I stood with unlit candles,
  my swim trunks for a tub birth,
a cell phone’s playlist — all suddenly unnecessary.

From its entrance, the slide’s staircase bends —
  a Möbius surface, I imagine, with echoes
of footsteps. With a vowel I couldn’t type,

you came — a long cry slipping without
  consonant, a wail open-throated & oculus:
framing a forgotten infinite. Dar a luz,

I learned to say in my pocho Spanish.
  The light that plays in words like ecstatic
& ekphrastic begins outside, begins

in displacement. Your mother birthed then
  the birth less remembered, that other planet —
a wet black placa, a sojourner’s satchel spent

of nourishment — as you suckled & passed
  unceremoniously the tar-dark meconium,
a Greek word for poppy, for opium.