from The Runaway Soul

1930

I was slapped and hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—the blind boy’s rose-and-milk-and-gray-walled (and salty) aquarium, the aquarium overthrown, the uproar in the woman-barn ... the fantastic sloppiness of one’s coming into existence, one’s early election, one’s senses in the radiant and raw stuff of howlingly sore and unexplained registry in the new everywhere, immensely unknown, disbelief and shakenness, the awful contamination of actual light. I think I remember the breath crouched in me and then leaping out yowlingly: this uncancellable sort of beginning.