My Mother as Anticlea, Upon Forgetting
I will have traveled all this way only to have you forget
my name, to stand on something
like a threshold and question who I am
and what I have done with your daughter
who was sent for milk, never to return.
Or, late. Well-late. Well into those later years of grieving.
Here’s the trough to drink from to recall, shallow and bloody.
And, ah, now!, a semblance of recollection.
And some of what has been until now unknown or unsaid.
Deep Sleep
You slept all the time those last few months.
I’d find you stretched out on the couch with your hands just so
and you’d startle, asking where I’d come from, as if
I had come from afar—another planet, and why not?
Such a strange girl from the get go.
Was it deep—this sleep?
Though by then, there were all the tangles, what is called tau.
And we were just treading in the deep end, being asked to
use a pencil to draw from one point to another. And failing.
Down to where the body’s temperature cools
and the brain does its cleansing—is where we should aim
for, they say.
And, so, the dark, chill room.
And the sound of waves, if we like, if they will soothe.
And we’ll wake, having said we never dreamt.
