The Luster of Everything I’m Already Forgetting
I press my mouth to my son’s warm back, cowbells distant. This wild
longing to keep my body between his & any kind of desolation. Sharp-
boned spells to ripen baskets of Old World potatoes & Christ’s body
dry on my tongue: make me a good mother. A woman photographed a polar
bear dragging a cub’s head across snow, tendons’ red wreckage the color
of earth after it’s burned or how fireflies’ light look after you’ve smashed 100
bodies to pulp a still shimmer of survival. The doctor cut my perineum
to free my son, heartbeat galloping—& now he wants to sleep standing
like a cow but I beg him to sleep, say cows can only dream on their veined
sides. I think of the mother bear if she isn’t dead, how was the cub taken
unless famine season— but we have to fight to the death, don’t we. My son asks
how he got out of my dark body. I tell him he was cut free & he says he folded
himself like origami before emerging a scorpion razor-tailing out.
When he sleeps I re-hang fallen star map & trace his blue crayon trails (Google
says they’re lies) over Eradinus, heaven’s river its star names catch my mother
throat: Azha, hatching place Keid’s broken eggshells. I don’t wake my son to look
at the moon. He sleeps to grow, while I suture velvet hands that care too much
& not enough. Sad house, since the cat has gone. I want answers from these quiet walls
—it has watched mothers before me hold vomiting children & then bathe them.
This is the task we’re given, stay, because if you go, your child may wander
into a field filled with rifle fire. & the origami body paper-thin skin cleft
from yours can ignite: flaming wildflower scent in his matted hair steels
though me. Once my blue-veined breasts ached to feed him & I’m sorry
I can’t remember that pain anymore; how easy it is to forget the exactness of certain
blades. & is that the way the body heals again & again before entering the kingdom
of death, trees white-garlanded & the many women carrying water jugs? I miss
my grandmother who lost children young & her memories of holding them
dead, they were so luminous, she said, daylight just gone. The soul’s homeland
nameless. Now, their bones all braided together yellow tulips shake dirt loose.