What we did before we were born

I was busy being onions and anthracite, peonies and cnidaria. You were a canary, sunshiney and sweet-voiced, and my mother, she had hands of ball lightning and teeth of papaya trees. My father refuses to speculate upon where he came from, but my molecular self recognizes how he was iron unalloyed, hammered hot by ancient hands, and cattails rising from a slow-moving river, and silica sparkling on a shore. He won't say he agrees with me, but I can read the fluency he feels when he has his feet in the sand.

We don't all remember such primordia, the particulars of our solid selves before we were born. I only know these things because my deathless atoms insist upon it. The elements murmur into my incarnate ear about how the stars fell from the firmament, how the magnets came to yearn, taut and polar. They say I can remember how it feels to never die. I listen, percussive with pulse, devoutly bipedal. I like this idea best of all.