FROM THE BOOK OF MOTHERS

The smell of your skin fades.

I forget your heft in my arms,

your hand reaching up to cup my face

as you nurse, curling into sleep.

Daughter, is it your aging

or my own I fear most?

In fairy tales, the child is trapped

within the refrain: motherless, motherless.

In myth, the child is set adrift, left to water’s

blind grace, the current’s whims.

In some part of myself, I remain

a child behind glass, watching the tall grass

through which my mother drove, the splash of blue

drawing near. Waiting for the moment

when she decided whose life to save,

swerving to avoid plunging into the lake.

If we are boats, how do we unmoor ourselves, how do we glide?

Instructions for a dai delivering a girl:

For eighty cents more,

take the newborn child,

hold her by the waist,

turn her upside down,

give a sharp jerk

to snap the spinal cord.

Pronounce her

stillborn.

Items for a baby girl:

Tiny bangles for each wrist.

Gold for piercing her ears at birth.

Dark Mother, you appear to me

as mad. Mistress of blood, death,

and the death of death,

you surface from the Ganges, pregnant,

stoop to give birth on shore,

then devour your child.

Bearer of destruction, Goddess of Time and Change,

Kali, how can I bring myself to accept your universe?

Motherhood: rowing away from the shore.

They say:

amniotic fluid is the ocean,

blood pumping to the mother’s heart fills the child’s ears with first sounds,

the infant knows her mother by smell before sight,

the cord that binds them dies once severed.

They say.

Mi navel string bury there.

When my sister’s first girl came into the world,

she came with the cord wrapped around her neck.

She did not see her mother’s face. She did not know

she was loved before she was.

Mother, I am the dark in your eye.

From my grandmother’s line

eleven girls have descended, no boys

in three generations.

The women in my family repeat lives:

migrations, madness, exile,

mothers and daughters estranged—

connected by a storey

that wants to go on without end—

Motherhood: the doll whose head refuses to return to its body.

I did not hear or could not listen.

I barely knew you when you called.

Now when it is too late

I want to tell you I am a mother

and think I understand something

more of grief’s depths. I am a mother

like but also not like you. My friend

(may I call you this in death?)

my child’s throat I

lean toward to kiss.

Motherhood: the promise of feathers against plucking fingers.

I will have to admit you—unclaimed woman,

betrayed wife, daughter of the gods, yet exiled.

Prideful one, scorned one, vengeful one—

Medea, your daughters walk the earth, drowning

offspring in bathtubs and lakes,

slashing their children’s throats. Medea:

spectre within each of us

who brings forth life.

I recite the Hebrew alphabet each time

I must do something my children fear.

Alef Bet Gimel Dalet…

Voice hushed, speech slow,

I repeat these sounds till their breathing stills,

…Lamed Mem Nun…

tears cease, their bodies given over

to a language we do and do not know.

Motherhood: the country of want, of want, of want.

The old stories had it wrong. Each woman

is within herself mother and daughter, bound

by the same spell. The witch is also she.

So the hag. So too Old Higue who leaves her body

nights to visit the child she was in the crib,

suckling the infant’s blood to regain her youth,

then burning in a brine of flesh

when she tries to return to her skin.

If you were a dress, I would wear you, just like my second skin.

Force-ripe.

Spoiled fruit.

I, Eve, in this boxcar. I, Eve, hearing the wheels

clacking on tracks, the engine’s churning. I, Eve,

fitted into the other mothers.

If you see my daughters, tell them—

Final note to Demeter:

Bucket, bucket go a well.

Bucket bottom drop out.

Demeter’s reply:

Bucket, bucket go a well.

Bucket bottom drop out.

Pushed from the calabash, stained by its pulp,

we were turned into little girls.

Sent to ease your life, we cooked porridge,

swept the yard, tended goats and fowl.

But the Great Spirit has taken us back,

hearing you curse us: wutless creatures.

Returned to oblivion, we have forgotten

the feel of your hands laying us down

by the fire. Where are you, mother,

now the spell is broken?

Daughter, I am the dark in your eye.

My two-year-old’s refrain:

You tell me the answer, Mummy.

Dear Mother, Dear M., other, Dear other, my dear other.

But here you surface again,

scales glittering in the sun. With a flick of your tail,

I would follow you

to any depths. I would weave a net

from my hair, catch fish

for us to feast all day long.

I would stitch your skin with kisses,

reel in the language marooned between us.

But you will never return to me. You,

mermaid in question, of course have gone.

What is separation’s geography?

The mother’s body is the country

of our earliest memory, the soil

from which we are formed.

Our lives are an arc of flight:

away, toward, away.

Instructions for lighting candles for Shabbat:

Take the match to each candle’s wick. With cupped palms,

pull the light toward you, encircling it with your arms.

Do this three times. Now cover your eyes

to bring the flame inside.

Items for mothering:

Thimble, needle, thread.

Three pinches of salt.

Make me remember: scallop of flesh, crescent of skin,

pulse at the base of her throat.

Help me keep the memory of my girl,

stave off her inevitable bloom.

Motherhood: the nitty-gritty, the dirty ditty, jingle-jangle, splash, pizzazz.

Sing a light song, Mummy.

Twinkle, twinkle—

No the other light song.

This little light of mine—

No. A different light song.

Motherhood:

If not the tree outside, if not the quiet within,

if not the coming storm, if not the girl

dressing up in crinoline, the woman

browning garlic in the pan,

if not this room, this life,

then where, then when?