Purvai Aranya |
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What is Mine
Mother does not have hands enough to tell me
her stories. Some days I feel like she wants to hold it all
at once, the un-holdable of it, the endless thrashing of it.
She wants to hold it out to me. What can I say?
It does not feel hard to imagine this as the flesh I came from.
She feels like mine. Her pink palms, secret moles, desert back
all an extension of my own meagre flesh. I hold her and I
feel held. The love sharp as light knifing through her bones.
Mother first screen to blurry new world. Mother the way she
looks through my skin. Mother her eyes, both sharp and blind.
And mother always as she swerves into not-mother. Stranger
woman with tangled other lives she cannot tame. Mother wild.
She and I lay still for hours, or else we move and move,
always crumbling mirrors angled to each other. Two women
so strong we are fated to tangle horns. When we talk about me
we are really talking about her: but her stories are always mine.
In a previous life we must have been lovers. Or else
a story-book king and his long-plumed parrot, a bird
weighted with royal soul even in the deep distance of sky,
even in drowning blue, not alone. It is true that I am hers.
Mother does not have hands enough to tell me
her stories. Some days I feel like she wants to hold it all
at once, the un-holdable of it, the endless thrashing of it.
She wants to hold it out to me. What can I say?
It does not feel hard to imagine this as the flesh I came from.
She feels like mine. Her pink palms, secret moles, desert back
all an extension of my own meagre flesh. I hold her and I
feel held. The love sharp as light knifing through her bones.
Mother first screen to blurry new world. Mother the way she
looks through my skin. Mother her eyes, both sharp and blind.
And mother always as she swerves into not-mother. Stranger
woman with tangled other lives she cannot tame. Mother wild.
She and I lay still for hours, or else we move and move,
always crumbling mirrors angled to each other. Two women
so strong we are fated to tangle horns. When we talk about me
we are really talking about her: but her stories are always mine.
In a previous life we must have been lovers. Or else
a story-book king and his long-plumed parrot, a bird
weighted with royal soul even in the deep distance of sky,
even in drowning blue, not alone. It is true that I am hers.