Enchantment

September: you make your way 
between your mother's thighs. 
That is to say, indigo profusion
of salvia on the periphery, bats
flying at dusk over the army

hospital close to the Pasig River
where someone typed in names
on a blank birth certificate form.
That is to say, somehow you 
are a parcel conveyed from one  

set of arms to another even before 
cords of the birth stump wither
on each end. This, after all,
is a country of a thousand secrets
carried carefully in women's throats.

Even the backs of moths have eyes 
that look like doors. Once vivid, blood 
dries to the color of wilted hydrangeas. 
The only way to avoid being pinned 
to the windmill or torn like a kite is to let 

someone else inhabit this story. Bend 
your head over the font of holy water; mouth
the shape of your new names, the sounds
of their splitting and reconstituting. Hold the hand 
that leads you away and into the rest of another life.