The Insistance of Instinct

Fog horns at night in the Port of New York
where the child was raised after arriving from Africa
Fog horns weighed anchor in her
through myriad siren songs and undercurrents.

To them she responds like geese to the call,
of "let us fly springtime to the Arctic,
and back down again when fall arrives,
and winter blows hard behind us."

The instinct of species is what it is,
bite of stirrings you do not suppress for long
like inland sea is to inland her,
blurred yet no less distinct this craving.

Fog horns of then ---
insistence of instinct on Riverside Drive
where the girl once walked a virgin
to which she regresses mentally

Ocean salinity, my own blood's salinity,
salinity related to ethnicity,
related as well to menstrual cycles
as Eve is related to Adam

as Adam is related to dirt.