Amaya has come home
though that word is not quite right.
She has returned with chips of winter
stuck in her teeth
but it is spring now.
The air is smooth as the flesh over a man's ribs.
Just touching grass, just treading quietly
is almost as easy and far gentler
than making love.
The wind breathes Africa on us and the sea
is a sweet juice squeezed up over the sand.
Azkorri's children go to the cliffs
and lean backwards into the wind,
praying to rise like kites.
In the tradition of the new season
Amaya
(my drug addict, my breaker of mirrors)
is pregnant.
A memory of my mother laps on one of my messier shores.
She is drowning quietly in the slough
of my dead sister's clothes
clutching a flimsy rope of gold,
coughing, ‘But she was so beautiful,’
as if that was enough
as if that was anything at all.
Yet that is what I think myself
when I hear Amaya in my bathroom,
shaken like a rug by her furious belly,
rippling again and again over the toilet.
I whisper to the wall: God, she is so beautiful,
knowing this is neither an excuse
nor a prayer.
For a month, she scratches around for a willing doctor
in this Catholic maze of whitewashed houses,
this village whipped to chastity by winter sleet.
The only abortionist is the greedy surgeon
(forensic) who wastes Sundays
drinking with her stepfather (policeman).
He calls her a whore.
A trip to France is the only door
out of her iron-maiden body.
The year does not matter, nor the country,
nor this spiced green season.
Beauty is a talisman in myths she never learned.
It does not guide her now,
alone on the other side of the border,
slipping against oiled French words.
She dreams awake of serrated edges and steel knives.
This is anywoman's dream, in every country, every season,
but the irony of spring amuses Amaya.
She comes back with a white grin, lips tight as scars.
A fever of infection reddens in her
but she is blessedly hollow
as a cathedral's carved dome.
She makes a bed on my floor and sleeps for two days.
Amaya's body remains what it was
when I first found her, slightly thicker
than her skeleton, a famine's dog.
She picks at boiled potatoes, sucks at milk and eggs,
grimacing, exhausted by nourishment.
She almost stayed pure this winter,
heaved heroin again
and again out of her ransacked veins.
But her tongue (a tidy hiding-place for needle-marks)
is still a painter's rag for red oils.
When I watch Amaya's face, I hear another woman rasping
at my back, her face draped in deeper shadow.
Once she said, It is easier to be a memory
than it is to be alive.
Amaya, she lied.
See yourself,
the pitch river of hair
spilling down the ravine of your back,
bones pearled in pale velvet, raven-eyes.
Amaya, I whisper, go gently.
A talent for sorrow is almost
a talent for love.
Only the key is different.
Sing until you find the other sound.
I speak to the night while she sleeps by my bed.
She rolls over.
A white hand hooks like a cloud
between the steep ridge of hips and ribs.
Amaya lies dreaming on the floor,
her bones warping in rancid blood.