how the mother takes the form of
fear and presses it into dough,
shaping christmas trees and peeling
away sugar sweet spindles of extra
love before rolling another ball and
flattening it with her palm into a
cookie too small for the cutter.
i miss my father
too.
The ice cream didn't work
The constellations breathwork holy yoga retreat did not either
Neither did the psychiatric ward or the Zoloft and Seroquel
Or the guru whose eyes promised heaven
None of the trips to Mecca or otherwise nor the moves across country or alleys
The new discoveries about the plasticity of the brain and the role of trauma
Or the function of attachment styles; all came up zero
The Holy Scriptures though they made you burn with longing did not save you either
There were so many templates within which to fit, so many ways to the pearl
None of them worked
No not the lover of your dreams either
In the end you were left where you started
Sitting before the universe unfolding before you
And no pathway around it
I fear when I break my leg
that I would never be able
to take him to school again.
I fear when I cut my fingers
that I would never be able
to feed him again.
I shiver like an autumn leaf
in a decaying stem
when I think of death
taking me away from him.
A selfish daughter, a selfish sister,
a selfish employee and a selfish wife,
I learn for the first time
what it means to really care for someone,
what it means to love and
what it means to be a mother.
When I make my first steps into
the wide sea and a swarm of juvenile
gilt-breams swirl around my legs,
I linger on the brink of the beryl-beach
like an infatuated maiden moon,
my feet submerged in salt-water
as I sense the soft skins of the breams
and rejoice in their silver transparencies –
Suddenly as I swim, I feel
frightened by my own shadow
beneath me as if it were the shadow
of a wild thief possessing me
or the unknown shadows of multitudes
threatening my communion
with the nurturing salt-water
that did bear me as a child.
The gilt-breams still slide
on the diaphanous waters,
their lithe dorsal fins bent down
like folded sails while I dive
head-down into the salt-water,
blessing each mineral ion oozing
into my skin, carrying me into
the depths, rendering me weightless.
While I swim back towards the shore
the gilt-breams slither along the breaths
of the soft sands, their spines, secretly
clasping their silver-shaded lamella
blending in their own transparencies,
with their crimson phosphorescent
gills, pumping mineral oxygen
like a marine heart bitter to the taste.
*****
Juvenile fish always swim between my feet when I enter the seas of my childhood. I feel so very weightless when I float in the water. Swarms of juvenile bass or juvenile pike follow me into the blue-green sea as I walk through the dunes. They stretch for miles into the expanse like sea-breasts spreading plankton to nurture the fish and the currents and replenish the earth’s atmosphere with oxygen. When I swim, I defy gravity: in modes of crawl, backstroke or butterfly, I feel heft-free. I recall the softness of the juvenile fish-skins rubbing against mine and still cherish the sensation in my effective adult memory.
Like me in sea-water, astronauts defy gravity. But in zero gravity, their senses are blunted. They appreciate extremely spicy food to compensate for the dulling of their taste. They say that they even feel their vital organs floating inside their bodies when they move inside the shuttle, as if their organs were toy glass-marbles with which they played as children. Astronauts are constantly jet-lagged. Zero gravity also challenges their circadian rhythms of wake and sleep that get distorted, like the wayward clocks that Salvador Dali painted in The Persistence of Memory.
As they look down at our spinning world, days become extended into mostly fifteen dawns surprising them like myriad suns rising through their shuttle windows. That’s how surprised I feel when wave is borne into wave with the sea wind and waves bear my half-swimming body to the safety of the shore. Then, as now, silver-finned fish swim around me with their diaphanous specter-like silhouettes and I feel refreshed. I have seen pictures of astronauts drifting around the space shuttle crawling into themselves like fetuses floating in the maternal womb. As archaic as primal sea creatures might seem to us, these pictures remind me of the snail fish slowly swimming in the freezing depths of the Mariana Trench.
Fascinated by life in space and under the seas ever since I remember, as a young girl, reading, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I imagine men colonizing the sea-depths with cities built with impermeable nano-materials made of cellulose or vinyl or soft hybrid eco-leather to keep us safe in a subterranean environment. We would probably use the cellulose-covered plants as a model for the invention of such hermetic materials. We would move in and around the cities in water-proof cars and water-proof motorcycles. Our houses would be connected, each to each, by bridges and corridors, allowing us to move between them. We would communicate with each other through impermeable electronic devices. Our food would be delivered from the shore and we would keep a lot of stocks in refrigerators.
“We wage war because we do not assimilate our proper shadows”
Robots would help deliver merchandise from the land as they would help with daily tasks. Our clothes would have to be made of vinyl-like materials that envelop woolen or cotton underclothes to keep us dry under water continually. Like the astronauts, we would drink fruit juices and consume smoothies bursting with vitamins. Above all, we would have to be extremely thrifty in our usage of water because it would have to be desalinated from sea-water and be transferred to our homes through water-tunnels made of stainless steel and other expensive non-corrosive metals. Like the astronauts, we would probably have to use ventilators and scrubbers to purify the air to enable us to breathe.
I was surprised like a young astronaut seeing the world spin for the very first time, when the phone rang, and friends invited me to see an episode of Star Wars. I forsake my imagination to accept the invitation. After the movie, I wondered whether we would, indeed, fight to maintain our humanity in the quilted wild world of space exploration. It seemed odd that so much effort spent by human courage, mechanical precision, and recycled order that made space missions successful would be wasted on fighting star wars.
But, then again, our pioneering and territorial needs, coupled with the competitiveness of space discovery, would turn space wars into an inevitable reality, whose only consolation would be to remain as humanly courageous and compassionate as possible. Yet, the hostility of the environment would unite us around our common humanity. As astronauts who use their daily food thriftily to survive in their shuttle, we would have to use our resources economically to survive in a hostile environment as barren as a waterless desert.
My brother was, again, drunk, lying on the top step of the big church on the hill, the one with the bright bronze doors. He lifted his head to say, fuck you, to the bright bronze doors of the church, then he put his head back down on the step, closed his eyes, and cradled an empty bottle of Bacardi the way he cradled his stuffed elephant toy when he was a child. Our neighbor told my mother over the phone, your son is drunk again. Find your drunk son on the steps of that big church on the hill, the one with the bright bronze doors. No one walked towards him to shush him, said the neighbor, and the priest did not stop watching child porn in his private quarters to offer my brother forgiveness, and Jesus did not step down from his cross to make my brother a disciple, or even share a bottle of wine with him. That’s why he said, fuck you, to the big bronze doors of the church on the hill, the neighbor said. Jesus turned water into wine for people who could have had a wedding without wine, but my brother needed that wine to keep living. This ain’t no wedding; this is life.
My mother, begged my father for a ride to the big church on the hill. Fuck no, he said. Fuck that drunk. You see, my brother was not my father’s son, so he washed his hands of any responsibility for him. My father did not have any guilt, of what he could have done wrong with my brother, if a wrong decision in his childhood made my brother so broken that he had to say, fuck you, to the doors of a church, the one on the hill, then fall asleep cradling a bottle, the way he cradled his stuffed elephant when he was a child. My mother, she lived with some guilt, I am sure, so she begged my father. Please, take me to him. I need help carrying him to his bed. Please, drive me to him. Fuck that, my father said. I may lose my parking spot. I need to wake up early in the morning. What would that teach him, if his mother constantly runs to him whenever he falls drunk on the steps of a church. My father still drove her, though. My father really was saying fuck you to the man who never responded to my brother’s letters. That man sent that stuffed elephant to my brother with a promise of connection, then cut that connection as soon as my brother said, I love you, Pop. Thank you for the elephant, Pop. I love you.
“Please, take me to him. I need help carrying him to his bed.”
He was on the top step of the church, cradling his stuffed elephant, I mean empty Bacardi bottle. The gold doors shined behind my brother, and my mother, walked up the hill, then step by step by step by step by step, to the doors of the church to get to my brother. In that bible story, the son returns to the family, but at this church, the mother was returning to the son. My mother, went to him and pulled the bottle away from his arms. Startled, he yelled, fuck you, when the stuffed elephant, I mean the Bacardi bottle, was out of his arms. My mother said, this is your mother. Watch your mouth. Get up now. Someone may see you. He said, fuck you, again. My mother said, we don’t want people talking about you being a drunk outside of a church. He said fuck you again, then cried. My mother said, don’t cry out here, son. Let’s go to your bed. She carried the stuffed elephant, I mean, the empty bottle, I mean the stuffed elephant, I mean the empty bottle, because leaving an empty Bacardi bottle at the church would be an affront to Jesus and crosses and saints and solid bronze doors and priests who watch child porn. She placed his arm around her shoulder, placed her arm around his waist, then walked to the car. My mother, walked my brother and the elephant, I mean the empty bottle, to the car. The car running, my father looked ahead waiting patiently to hear the backseat car door close. My mother knew her burden, but she loved him. If she was the only person who did love him, she was going to love him.