IV
Hush, beloved. It doesnāt matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.
āLOUISE GLĆCK, āThe White Liliesā
Bread
At dusk the girl who will become my mother
stands peering over potted jade leaves
and burnished pebbles through bay windows
onto Sparks Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Flakes of snow swarm and clotāsoft grey
moths around the globe street lamps
just now bursting into glowing zinc peaches.
Behind her there is the kitchen where a broad
woman, whose voice is rich from within, skin
shining like walnut shells, someone with
a daughter, also, slaps and pounds a fat lump
of warm dough against the wood countertop,
a haze of flour encircling her so that she, too,
is a haloed thing. And within the study lined
with books, and way beyond, my mother sees
all airborne things and how her mind connects
the swirling dots. So this is how her mind moves,
though her brown leather soles, laced tight
rest firmly on the worn threads woven long ago
(much older than she is by far) by quick hands
in Turkey or Thailand, places sheād like to go
gleaming indigos and golds, persimmon and
pomegranateācolors that would stain the fingers.
Her body is thick, her mother says, like a little
pony and she stamps her footāno! (she is winged
Pegasus here at her grandmotherās)āgazes
toward the looking glass above the bamboo-grass
cloth behind the velvet arms of a loveseat where
she likes to sit reading, stockinged feet curled
beneath, and sees reflected flaxen plaits drinking
street light in to gleam. Somewhere, the white toy
poodle yips. She could card and spin this life of
hers into a long fine thread of liquid gold, she
knows, a skein heavy in her hands with heft
like loaves Rose will take from the oven in two
hours for supper, small wisps of steam
dampening her tight black curls, her face dusted
with flour pollen. . . . And someday just beyond
another decade, half again the years she
already owns, the girl will remember this snowy
afternoon, the glow inside and out, the bread
in her hands when Rose steps toward her, and
a sweet milk scent thick in her noseāas she leans
to press her lips against my smooth warm head.
Firstborn
āI miss my sons but there was nothing
to eat,ā says Akthar Muhammad, who traded his children
for wheat in Kangori, Afghanistan.
āWhat else could I do?ā Average
life expectancy: 44, and one
in five kids die or more
before the age of 5.
āI have sold the two most intelligent of my ten.ā
For Sher, 10, per month:
forty-six lbs. of wheat,
and Baz, half the years, half that amountāboth
sold for six years.
Sar-i-pol Province, a village
of mud-walled dwellings, and somebodyās babies sent
on a three hoursā walk
through rolling hills to the larger
town of Sholgarah. āI felt bad that I was sold,ā
says the older. āI work very
hard and during the night
they send me into the mountains to sleep with the sheep.
I felt bad that I was sold.
I cried. I still cry.
I cry at night. But I understand why
the selling of me was necessary.
I must go now.
I must hurry or they will beat me.ā (March
second, 2002)
Flesh of my flesh, bread
of my soul, such fortune finds us fed, together
still. Please give me strength.
Birthday
Up at Five Corners, beneath hawthorn scrub just off-road
a mother, already cold, lay
like a dashed-off letter ācā in the midst
of her six babiesāeach no longer than a ballpoint pen,
furāwhite, brown, black,
wet from puddle spray, tapered ears caked
with mud. I peered close to see blood. None? As if
they stretched out willingly
to sleep, snugged into tangled grass
on the scraggly ridge. But why? This was months ago; why
I stopped the truck at all
remains a mystery, as well
as why the image floods back this morning, the first
hours of my birthday,
though I was not born
until late afternoonāand so today I wonder
how my mother
must have felt waking up
āsensing something would change soon, resting
on the cusp as she was
of a language no one could foresee.
My god, how lucky we are, those of us who make it, who rise
again to catch a sweet waft
of twiggy silver sticks
growing soft to burst . . . this world nothing but a text
for someone to read: I see
Iām blessed.
Grace Absentia
What you could never know nor plan began
long before conception, though, now you can hold
each eidolon in mindātriplicate sisters
never to be yours, never to beāclouds from above
with erose edges, notched like mutable leaves;
every leavi...