That night I fought my father
But he was mute, a hazel-eyed wolf,
And I was full of hate and pity.
And when I had won I walked away from his wolfless body
As he became a man again.
I walked alone for the first time,
And love was in my eyes.
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The waiting quality of being young.
And the thoughts, that if you thought them enough, became yours.
And the way we grew accustomed to our little geographies.
And the way some of us became accustomed to being alone.
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Say I woke every morning for years.
Say that every morning I had a pain in my chest,
My heart a pounding clock
Before I’ve even made a bowl of scrambled eggs.
Say that there was a riddle to be solved, about how to get the pain away, or out,
Or how to unravel it.
My mother said we would be happy because we were young and trying hard.
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Dad, searching our faces
For the oldest question.
Ah, the morning’s broken pimple.
And Dad touches my chin,
Made after him,
Cleft left like a divorce.
Man, woman, marriage-home. Their bed with its tall, bent-in brass knobs.
And all the stories made for children.
My father held the question so tightly
That he came to believe it was his own,
Rather than one being asked of him.
A question so tight it became a story.
Say that I woke every morning for five, ten, twenty-five years.
Say that every morning I had a heart
It begged to be loved.
It went looking.
Say that I were no different than any other person.
Say that there were no riddle.
Or say that there were no pain.
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Say that I was alive every morning for many years.
Say that my mother, my father, my brother were alive on those mornings.
Say that one day it would no longer be this way.
Say that one day the world would not be ours.
Say that it was never ours.
Say that there was no reason for you to be here.
Say that the first sound you ever heard was your mother’s voice
And then it was a vibration through her bones
Into the water beyond your body.
You were shaken by it. Everything inside you moved all at once.
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Say that there is no reason.
Say that you wake in a city on the edge of a continent
That swam thousands of miles from a sister it never had to name.
And you’ll end up like ocean plastic, drifting up and down a column of carbon.
I’m not sure you remember,
But there was the floor of the earth, right,
And some days you moved along the floor-face of it
And it tried to peer up at you with its enormous, weeping, oozing, flowering eyes,
And it tried to force even a little green life out of its dusty coverings,
And it tried to hold you up and hold you down and hold you in
And you never felt it beneath you with your powerful, delicate, important feet.
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The first day there
I came upon the red crest of a pileated woodpecker as it foraged
On carpenter ants in a fallen log.
I went walking for miles
The way Djune does every afternoon.
We walked the way our mothers walked;
But why were women always the walkers.
Say the rain were light and steady,
The sky opaque.
That things grew waterlogged like wood.
Say we would wake after the rains
And my mother’s magenta lilacs
Would be further along in their life cycle.
Say we got down on our hands and knees
To pull up ramps right to the bulb
Easing them out of the tight dark earth
In the roadside ditch.
We waved these ramps in the air;
We carried them up the road, towards the house.
Say we got down on our hands and knees
To thank the rains. So thank you rains.
And our fingers smelled of alliums for hours.
The ramps lay on the kitchen counter: clean, bright, acrid.
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M stopped sleeping in their parents’ bed when they learned that God is everywhere.
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I began walking in the palm of the world.
The hyacinths, the blue bells.
April was always a difficult month because the body had to remember
How to remain outside for many hours at a time,
How to push itself. But the body remembered.
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Months of not seeing my father.
He texts to say he misses me and puts a period at the end of the missing sentence.
And then, suddenly, seeing him at a diner and ordering a cherry lime rickey
So he might understand I am still his child.
How many times in one’s life
Would one lean one’s hands against the wooden walls of a New England kitchen
Slamming with grief?
I wanted to know if I had forgiven my father.
Of course the answer was in part. Some parts gone dormant.
This was surprising, since it reminded me of acceptance, or peace.
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Should we not have waited? Was there any other way?
Say your room is flooded with light.
That you live in a weather system where this is a common event, but not a constant.
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One day I might have a child, to keep myself
Tethered to my mother and father;
The child will be the only way to know my mother and father (but especially my mother).
Since I would be lost in this world without her,
And will need her always, then it only makes sense:
Having a child to be close to her.
In that way I can never outgrow my mother
Never outgrow needing her love and attentions.
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Lilacs on St. Marks
And my mother is crying because when I smell the lilacs she swears she can too,
We are one smelling thing. My mother, a superstitious woman.
Good to be a 66-year old woman totally infatuated with April’s bounty, I think.
I want to always be as in love with the blossoms
As my mother has been.
Closest to myself when it was May in Providence
I rode on my bike smelling everything I could, and shearing the lilacs,
Filling my basket, for a syrup that sat untouched in the fridge except for the prints of my sticky fingers.
Oh mama you cannot imagine.