Maria
o mother, we say, sighing in that way
where breath rhymes with bother
o mother me
the way you hold the betrayal
and promise of arrival here
in that constantly revolving womb
and it’s like this, isn’t it? when you
bring anyone anyway closer to living
how all they can see is all the dying
it takes to stay with it all, the beating
drum of you––
In the underworld.
He came here looking for the blind prophet. Through a hole he came down from the living, from his way by which he and the ways of his men were lost, again. Not to admit any wrong, not to admit the penance due those who anger the gods, but I knew my son. His stubborn stance. I was there with the other dead mothers and our stance was reaching from where we waited below the land of the living beneath where they burned the false claims they would make in slaying other sons––and our daughters, too, in the name of their stakes and how high they made them, where the air thinned. I knew my son and I saw his desperation in that heat. See me, I called to him. He looked up and I saw it on his face. Mother, he said.
He still knew the word. Yes, I said. Now go, I said to him, from this fire while you still live.
It was too hot and too loud for him to hear more though I meant to remind him back to the life he knew before he knew to wave flags above the graves of other mothers. Where he was barefoot and fed before he thought to scorch the land he meant to take. To add, take this body, son, that I gave you, and return it to the living earth.
***
Anticlea is the mother of Odysseus, who encounters her son in the underworld where he has come to find the blind prophet, Tiresias, to tell him the way back home.
And the rest of us.
There is no resolution, is there? So much is lost in the archive, and what isn’t––of memory, and the rest of us––isn’t mild. Our warped genesis, we tried to keep it in the basement and when the floods started coming, we watched our photos. How they bounced in the underground lake, above the sediments of our boxed secrets, those dreams of all we might yet be.
Here is our foundation: sacrifice, or accident? The awe of it.
Mama. How are you breathing now? Someone said of your lungs, that it doesn’t look––still, I think of your waves. How we would throw ourselves into you to feel the rush of you tossing us back. Sometimes you would hold us in place for the space of the next breath we expected to take, so that we might know something. I’m still trying to know it. It has to do with fragility and strength, play and death, love, and the depths of some wounds. As if you are saying, feel this: all of me shifting with each pulse and the only one holding is you.
The floods keep coming. Still, we collect. A song starts and catches in the back of the throat. Wade in––
