Mother’s Hands Drawing Me

undying, blading into air,

impersonal, forced, curving it

down — drought incessant rain

revolution and the organs shutting

down but not these extremities,

here since I first opened my first

eyes first day and there they were,

delicate, pointing, will not back off,

cannot be remembered. Mother,

dying — mother not wanting to

die — mother scared awakening

each night thinking she’s dead —

crying out — mother not

remembering who I am as I run

in — who am I — mother we must

take away the phone because who

will you call next — now saying I

dreamt I have to get this dress on, if

I get this dress on I will not die —

mother who cannot get the dress on

because of broken hip and broken

arm and tubes and coils and pan

and everywhere pain, wandering

delirium, in the fetid shadow-

world — geotrauma — trans-

natural — what is this message

you have been scribbling all your

life to me, what is this you drag

again today into non-being. Draw it.

The me who is not here. Who is the

ghost in this room. What am I that

is now drawn. Where are we

heading. Into what do you throw

me with your quick eye — up onto

me then down onto the blank of the

page. You rip the face

off. I see my elbow there where

now you bend it with the pen, you

fill it in, you slough it off me onto

more just-now making of more

future. You look back up, you take

my strangeness from me, you

machine me, you hatch me in. To

make what, mother, here in this

eternity this second this million

years where I watch as each thing is

seen and cancelled-out and re-

produced — multiplying aspects of

light in the morning air — the

fingers dipping frantic into the bag

of pens, pencils, then here they

are — the images — and the hands

move — they are making a

line now, it is our world,

it horizons, we ghost, we sleepwalk,

everything around us is leveled,

canceled, we background, we

are barely remains, we remain, but

for what, the fingers are deepening

curling, bringing it round, the mind

does not — I don’t think — know this

but the fingers, oh, for all my life

scribbling open the unseen,

done with mere things, not

interested in appraisal, just

seizure — what is meant by

seizure — all energy, business-

serious, about direction, tracing

things that dissolve from thingness

into in-betweens — here firm lines,

here powdery lift off — hunger,

fear — the study begins — all is not

lost — the thought a few seconds

wide — the perusal having gone

from here to here, aggregates,

thicket, this spot could be where

we came in, or where we are saved,

could be a mistake, looks across

room through me, me not here

then, me trying to rise in the beam,

nothing I do will make it

happen, rock-face, work that

excludes everything that is not

itself, all urge in the process of

becoming all effect, how can I touch

that hand like snow moving, when

is it time again as here there is no

time, or time has been loaded but

not cocked, so is held in reserve, all

wound up, I was also made but not

like this, I look for reluctance,

expectation, but those are not the

temperatures — if only I could be in

the scene — my time is not

passing — whose is the time that is

passing — the hands rushing across

the paper, cloudy with a sun

outside also rushing scribbling —

wisdom turning itself away from

wisdom to be — what — a thing that

would gold-up but cannot, a patch

of blue outside suddenly like the

cessation of language when lips

cease to move — sun — self-

pronouncing — I want this to not be

my writing of it, want my hands not

to be here also, mingling with hers

who will not take my hand ever into

hers, no matter how late we are, no

matter that we have to run so fast

through all these people and I need

the hand, somewhere a radiant

clearing, are we heading for it, head

down towards the wide page, hand

full of high feeling, cannot tell if it

takes or gives, cannot tell what it is

that is generating the line, it comes

from the long fingers but is not

them, all is being spent, the feeling

that all — all that we need or have —

would be spent for this next thing

this capture, actually loud though

all you can hear is the small

scratching, and I feel dusk

approaching though it is still early

afternoon, just slipping,

no one here to see this but me, told

loud in silence by arcs, contours,

swell of wind, billowing, fluent —

ink chalk charcoal — sweeps, spirals,

the river that goes

nowhere, that has survived the

astonishments and will never

venture close to that heat again, is

cool here, looking up at what,

looking back down, how is it

possible the world still exists, as it

begins to take form there, in the not

being, there is once then there is the

big vocabulary, loosed, like

a jay’s song thrown down when the

bird goes away, cold mornings,

hauling dawn away with it, leaving

grackle and crow in sun — they have

known what to find in the unmade

undrawn unseen unmarked and

dragged it into here — that it be

visible.