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.
