137 Mother poems

Near dusk I find her in a newly mown field, lying still and face down in the coarse stubble. Her arms are splayed out on either side of her body, palms open and turned upward like two lilies, the slender fingers gently curling, as if holding onto something. Her legs are drawn up underneath her, as if she fell asleep there on her knees, perhaps while praying, perhaps intoxicated by the sweet liquid odor of sheared grass. Her small ankles, white and unscarred, are crossed one on top of the other, as if arranged so in ritual fashion. Her feet are bare. I cannot see her face, turned toward the ground as it is, but her long black hair is lovelier than I remember it, spilling across her back and down onto the felled stalks like a pour of glossy tar. Her flesh is smooth and cool, slightly resistant to my touch. I begin to look around me for something with which to carry her back—carry her back, I hear myself say, as if the words spoken aloud, even in a dream, will somehow make it possible. I am alone in a field, at dusk, the light leaving the way it has to, leaking away the way it has to behind a ridge of swiftly blackening hills. I lie down on the ground beside my mother under falling darkness and draw my coat over our bodies. We sleep there like that.

I call to ask my mother the name of the street where we bought the suitcases when we left Brooklyn. A better question would have been how did it feel to be sliced from the rib of Pine and Loring and sent, like a kite, up North. Or tell me what your mother said to you in her grand rear room the night we left, seated on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, muted in the low light. So many bellies in the house. Cacophony of kreyol and Brooklyn buk and sweet sweat across the walls. Did she tell you to follow your husband. Did she tell you anything about us. How, above all, you should keep us anchored to here, where the distance between comfort and safety is measurable by the length of the hallway, the distance from one room to the next. The rooms, like capsules, each with its own medicine for Black kids. Or, tell me what you wore on the plane ride. I only remember what I wore: stockings and Mary Janes and the pink knit pleated skirt. I did not remember this was your first time flying, a grown woman over thirty, and you had never seen how small the world looked beneath your feet.

for my mother They are fleeting. They are fragile. They require little water. They’ll surprise you. They’ll remind you that they aren’t and they are you.

from my mother's sadness, which was, to me, unbearable, until, it felt to me not like what I thought it felt like to her, and so felt inside myself—like death, like dying, which I would almost have rather done, though adding to her sadness would rather die than do— but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was— a form of gratitude which when last it came drifted like a meadow lit by torches of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms, when a hummingbird hovered nearby, I slipped into my mouth thereby coaxing the bird to scrawl on my tongue its heart's frenzy, its fleet nectar-questing song, with whom, with you, dear mother, I now sing along.

I still keep it hidden in the jar of  saltwater you gave me     don’t worry, no one can hear me, my husband’s in the bathroom & my daughter’s in her bedroom wearing those headphones made of sponges on her ears yes, I’ve kept it all these years, and kept it hidden, but — I have to tell you something: something about it has changed recently     has changed     since the last time we talked     the shell has opened, and — calm down      please      I’m about to tell you     I’ve waited years to tell you     how?     how could I have called you?     I don’t know where you live: I don’t even know your name! so     I’m telling you now: the gluey seam that held it closed     at some point it began to dissolve     I don’t know     around Christmastime, I suppose     but it was gradual     subtle     not something easily seen through water, through glass      so perhaps it started earlier than that, but that’s when I first noticed — (of course it’s still alive     I know because I know) so     after the seal first began to loosen, things accelerated after that     and I could see inside of  it     and what I saw was a tongue     but very pale     the tongue was white, in fact, and thin as a strip of paper     also smooth     no bumps or grooves     but there was no doubt: this was a tongue I’m sorry    I used the past tense only so that you might understand how it appeared to me when it was new and strange     to describe to you what I saw then     not because it’s changed     because it hasn’t      except in its familiarity I spend an hour with it every morning      and if the weather’s mild, after they’ve gone to bed, I take it out at night, lie on my back in the grass, hold the jar on my chest, and together we watch the metallic flower petals spin at each other in that dangerous memory of  heaven, or the past    please     don’t cry    no one’s to blame     and nothing’s ruined, nothing’s wrong      there’s no discomfort      there seems to be no pain     there’s only time, letting something looser     and I’ve made the preparations     it will die when I die no, she isn’t listening    and if  she is     well, then the eavesdropper’s punishment is hers      she can’t be spared      all her life spent holding her breath    only to hear     the sound absorbed by moss stuffed into the ears of  a stillborn kitten      all her life     over and over again at the kitchen table     playing the tapes of a conversation she recorded with a microphone slipped into a coffin thirty-six years ago     finding no meaning in those     and searching for the jar in which she’s certain it still floats      the tongue of  her mother’s ghost

How I loved those spiky suns, rooted stubborn as childhood in the grass, tough as the farmer’s big-headed children—the mats of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe. How sturdy they were and how slowly they turned themselves into galaxies, domes of ghost stars barely visible by day, pale cerebrums clinging to life on tough green stems.   Like you. Like you, in the end.   If you were here, I’d pluck this trembling globe to show how beautiful a thing can be a breath will tear away.

Last night I heard your voice, mother, The words you sang to me When I, a little barefoot boy, Knelt down against your knee. And tears gushed from my heart, mother, And passed beyond its wall, But though the fountain reached my throat The drops refused to fall. 'Tis ten years since you died, mother, Just ten dark years of pain, And oh, I only wish that I Could weep just once again.

I step into my mother’s room, she says, and though a woman’s body is a calendar of births and injunctions to death, time disappears. Only dead enough to bury could prove sound to silence or the anxiety I know by heart and lung. In my mother’s room. The tie between us anticipates any move to sever it. Terror and lack of perspective. The river runs clear without imparting its clarity, whether we step into it or not. Deep in the bones, he says. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in China can cause a storm in Rhode Island, how much more the residues of radiation, family resemblance and past rituals. The stove glows red. Thin apple trees line the road. You think you are taking a clean sheet of paper, and it’s already covered with signs, illegible, as by child’s hand. The heart has its rhythm of exchange, she says, without surplus or deficit. Mine murmurs your name while conjugating precise explosions with valves onto the infinite. I take it down with me, in the body, to develop in a darkroom of my own. They way the current elongates our reflection in the river and seems to carry it off. A death without corruption is the promise of photography, he says. Focus and light meter translating a cut of flesh into a tense past laughing its red off. But the film’s too clear. Even if smudged with fingerprints. Even if the light falls into the arms of love.

I can see her in the kitchen, Cooking up, for the hundredth time, A little something from her Limited Midwestern repertoire. Cigarette going in the ashtray, The red wine pulsing in its glass, A warning light meaning Everything was simmering Just below the steel lid Of her smile, as she boiled The beef into submission, Chopped her way Through the vegetable kingdom With the broken-handled knife I use tonight, feeling her Anger rising from the dark Chambers of the head Of cabbage I slice through, Missing her, wanting To chew things over With my mother again.

Even after darkness closed her eyes my mother could crochet. Her hands would walk the rows of wool turning, bending, to a woolen music. The dye lots were registered in memory: appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan, the stitches remembered like faded rhymes: pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell. Tied to our lives those past years by merely a soft colored yarn, she’d sit for hours, her dark lips moving as if reciting prayers, coaching the sighted hands.