NaPoWriMo-Day 4

This is a bit of a cheat, a revision, but I was glad to get back to it.

ON TELLING THE CHILDREN

I will be apprentice to this study for her. I mimic her gaps

for context, retrace the irrevocable meander of her logic for empathy

because I was born her fair to poor copy and she’s my polestar.  

Inside her: gaps and bursts. Most days the bursts

are heartbreaking. Other times we circle the same gaps,

and I try to be as I know she was with me once, our bleak

and common future to reverse the sphinx.

That you don’t know her is your misfortune. To know what she was, 

which was a hot planet’s core, a late summer’s best light

is a gift reserved for a small cohort; my mother will die

thinking I’m a dream or another version of herself           

Language was always between us, so my job is also to bear

the information for all of us. I seek it out as if it were a hunger,

then recite it back to her like a lullaby or a curse.

I tell my children her brain is pocked with illness, and I summon

up the softest image to tell the story. It’s a soft pink vulnerable jelly.

It is translucent and contains the future. In this reverie I hold it

in my hand and against a lamp because this is my form of intimacy.

My nails trace the brown spots that mark her losses. Beautiful

and sad and strange, I tell them because I need to make it into something else.