August, Los Angeles, Lullaby

The pure amnesia of her face, newborn. I looked so far into her that, for a while, the visual held no memory. Little by little, I returned to myself, waking to nurse those first nights in that familiar room where all the objects had been altered imperceptibly: the gardenia blooming in the dark in the scarred water glass, near the phone my handwriting illegible, the patterned lamp- shade angled downward and away from the long mirror where I stood and looked at the woman holding her child. Her face kept dissolving into expressions resembling my own, but the child’s was pure figurative, resembling no one. We floated together in the space a lullaby makes, head to head, half-sleeping.Save it, my mother would say, meaning just the opposite. She didn’t want to hear my evidence against her terrible optimism for me. And though, despite her, I can redeem, in a pawnshop sense, almost any bad moment from my childhood, I see now what she must have intended for me. I felt it for her, watching her as she slept, watching her suck as she dreamed of sucking, lightheaded with thirst as my blood flowed suddenly into tissue that changed it to milk. No matter that we were alone, there’s a texture that moves between me and whatever might have injured us then. Like the curtain’s sheer opacity, it remains drawn over what view we have of dawn here in this onetime desert, now green and replenished, its perfect climate unthreatened in memory— though outside, as usual, the wind blew, the bough bent, under the eaves, the hummingbird touched once the bloodcolored hourglass, the feeder, then was gone.