Self-Discovery at Midnight

When the clock strikes midnight,
she leaps from portholes
and laundry pails of
a large barge, its deck
stranded with seaweed and
its bottom encrusted
with thorny barnacles.
She leaps from
rummaging around for air
and choking with asthma
like her grandmother Emma and
all her cousins, but unlike
that snotty Ben who drank
a medicinal tonic with a sprig of parsley
after his overly rich dinner.
She leaps from fairy tales
of being born from a wave
and brought home
to a mother by a stork and
from the sentimental legend
of some white picket fence,
and social rhetoric that bamboozled
but never fed the heart.
She leaps from zealous rites
to configured beliefs that flutter up
then fall to doubt
where light fails and choirs
fall silent in stone cathedrals.
She leaps from the heritage
of high mountains,
low valleys, and icy tracks
where the soup of discovery
was home-made and
tears and sorrow were wrapped
with butter and cheese in pastry.
She leaps from a father’s farewell,
his cold shoulder scalding,
brushing past her existence
as if it were a brown stain
splashed on white porcelain.
She leaps from wrinkled annals
and sepia photos with fringed edges
like the ruins of an old civilization
where she can still discover
paradigms of paradise
while stormy thoughts,
like black exhaust, gather speed
when the clock strikes midnight.