Marking Him
Does my little son miss the smell
of his first mother? I wonder
as the mewl of his mouth
opens toward a plastic bottle
that is not her breast.
Sudden new mother,
I bury my nose deep
into his skullcap of ringlets,
his starry cheesiness.
In her good-bye letter to him
sealed in his album
with a birth certificate, which now
list my name as Mother,
his first mother writes
she nursed him briefly
after he emerged into
the second room of his world.
I think of milk, volcanic
and insistent, answering
the newborn’s gigantic thirst,
a primal agreement between
generosity and greed.
Sometimes I press my nose
to the glass of that place
where a mother and my child
belong to each other;
I cannot imagine coming
between them.
But then I want to lick him all over
with a cow’s thick tongue,
to taste him and mark him as mine
so if the other mother returns,
she will refuse her handled calf
smeared with my smell.
Copyright Credit: Margaret Hasse, "Marking Him" from Milk and Tides, published by Nodin Books. Copyright © 2008 by Margaret Hasse. Reprinted by permission of Margaret Hasse.