As My Mother Approaches Death Herself
I.
Not Eden, this, here where she said the wren
throws back her head and sings for joy;
because I’ve noticed how the wren turns when she sings,
now north, now south, now facing my cranked window
pushing outward with her song to form a sphere of hope,
the boundary meant to shield her nest against usurpers.
She sings all day, a desperate song, a song of war,
and marks her space with dread and threats;
I wake each morning to her fear.
Not pastoral, this field of vicious grass,
this place filled, she said, with cheerful daisies; but
who stretch for bees, implore for moisture, vie for sun;
each bush hides carcasses of those succumbed to shade;
where oriole pokes holes in tents that inborn fear has spun;
and gulps down writhing forms until they’re gone;
here milkweed leaves chewed raw until their sun goes dark,
where amidst this meadow carnage jostle goldenrod.
She’s ambled through, mistaking lack of speed for peace.
No peace, the opposite of life and love, is here;
how long, once the kingfisher has swallowed,
does the crayfish wait to die? She failed to tell me this.
She chats as I commit genocide in her flowerbed
and feed my child the stolen futures of trees;
we hear the cowbird victorious beside the shriveled chick;
watch the turtle deposit her life’s work in a hole.
There are lumps in the snake, a rabbit wails.
II.
I grew up thinking the world a joyful place,
Because that’s what I was told. But she only
told me half, an Easter Bunny world.
when the pain struck, I knew I was betrayed.
I blamed her even as she gave me to this world
in hope, and taught me song.
We sing; our lullabies are tinged with fear,
our arias the proof that we still breathe,
tenacious melodies of joy; peace of no peace,
here where all the work we do is only picking sides;
on earth, this earth, a ball of rock encased
in our thin layer of screams and cries.
She has one day left, maybe two; she wants them.
She is the wren; I am the fool.
There is nothing to forgive.
Joy and fear; they are the same.