The Days of the Ninth Month

for Olivia Chapman

They are not days, they are cenotes

riven in eternity, raindrop

by raindrop,

wet troughs plunging gravity, bending physics –

month of centuries, month of drowning

in my own flesh, month of Joshua’s stopped sun

around my waist. Her due date sat fixed

on my Sainsbury’s calendar, I crawled through the squares of it,

beneath the photograph of quinoa and pancetta salad,

hefted my body through awful nights of pancaked lungs,

acidic gullet, punched sinus,

the crushed, corked pelvis,

and when someone inevitably chirped

not long now! That’s flown by!

when the teasing strands of yet another dawn

fingered through my curtains

how can I tell of the courage it took

to rut the fattened mole of myself

again and again in black soil, among root-tendrils,

riverbeds, bones, blunt arrow-heads, history of war,

to burrow through the month’s clotted walls –

as though I had to sow and aerate the day

of her birth in time’s soil

like something that had never before existed?

*Cenotes are natural sinkholes in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, products of the collapse of limestone bedrock.