My Adoptive Mother

After writing more and more, after many notebooks of thoughts and journals and poems that I didn’t know at the time were poems, I understood that this spring that flowed from inside me would always be with me.

With writing, I was less an orphan. My mother had died, but language is a mother too. Language gave me many births, with every letter I wrote, and opened up horizons for me so that I might drink from her source, embrace her ‘p’s, and curl up inside her ‘u’s.

I’d take a word and peel off its skin, remove it from its context, ignore its history and where it came from. I’d make it clear and naked and an orphan, like me. Then I’d build from it a world. Language was my bread and water, the touch of my mother’s palm and my father’s broad chest. Language was everything, and I wrote it—everything.

I wrote and hid my writing in a box. The box was in a locked closet. To get a key you needed a blacksmith, to get a blacksmith you needed money, to get money you had to go to the bride . . . and the bride wanted a divorce.

The story was over before it began.