Mothers

When Brigit Pegeen Kelly writes about holding her daughter,

I pretend this is my mother speaking.

 

                           We are orphans together,

                             running the red bridge

                             from Japanese garden to British garden,

                             hushed laughter until we reach the greenhouse on the slope,

                             chests heaving. Chased

                             by the stepmother’s cruel blue eyes.

She reaches for me

across the bed we share for the weekend

(You’re grinding  your teeth):

a translation occurring, in the case of worry,

from compassion (woundable)

to antagonism (wounding).

                             My mother’s eyes were are also blue, but warmer,

                             softened by greens—

                             algal blooms

                             stitching blankets over unswum pools.

Much has been lost, but not this.

Outside of poems, our tones rarely match

the core of what we are saying.

                             how surely we are contained,

                             writes Brigit Pegeen Kelly

                             at the end of the beginning

                             of her first book.

                             how well our small boundaries love us.

How well my mother gave birth to a boy,

how well, and long after

that baby latched. And I saw it like a vision: the tragedy I’d asked for:

I would be asked to raise him.

And so I practiced boarding a bus,

just the baby and me,

dipping my finger into honey

and nippling it into his mouth.

                             In the land of our foremothers

                             roamed a spirit called Mamuna.

                             She rose at night from swamps to raid

                             the closest bassinets.

I often feel the love our boundaries have for us

dooms, to some extent, the love we have for each other.

                             Brigit, who can’t sleep when the moon is approaching fullness,

                             through whom a current of privacy glows,

                             who describes her son as a scything soldier,

                             her daughter as a hapless beauty, a ghost now, singing

                             through black-haired goats on the side of the road,

                             slow water, and every small, brown winging

in the bushes in the bramble—

Is it OK if I call you Brigit?

What does it mean to say I love you?

                             My mother collects the phrase I love you in various languages,

                             from strangers in cafes and airports.

Phone tucked to my ear,

book cradled on my lap,

I describe out loud the cedars,

and the quality of the air—cool, ice flecks—

and she says yes,

she can already smell it that way.

                             It was said you could persuade Mamuna

                             to return the baby she stole from you

                             if you hit the changeling with a stick

                             and poured water over its head from an eggshell.

                             It was said my mother was evil. This was a lie.

The poem must be mess because we love each other.

                             How well my switching lineage,

                             the sliver of Pacific

                             visible in the periphery,

                             my groping

                             ache when I click the correct number

                             and hear her voice.

Growing up, I could always tell

when my mother had recently talked to her mother

because her accent would be thicker.

Want like won’t.

I am surprised to find this effect still applies,

considering my grandmother can no longer speak.

                             For a long time, the only part of my poems anyone praised

                             were the endings.

                             I didn’t mind.

                             The way I understood it, if the ending was good,

                             it cast goodness back over the whole.

                             I thought we could be saved at the last minute.

In a language neither of us knows,

she is telling me she loves me,

and I am repeating the sounds back to her,

learning.

It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest.