How a Mother

May you live a long life
—Jewish saying
I want my life to be something more than long
—Pippin

A stuttering of froth
I mean an embryo in its space sac
its flaccid suit holding a fluid mountain
I mean an embryonic trying to ooze its way human 
What bulges become
How salt is pinched
That beginnings house splinters of their end
The weather between ooze and the cry-slap
The whisper between fluttering and the mother 

Fractions stretch on a childhood
How our arrows don’t parallel
I mean how you tried to curfew a life 
Saturn eats regret 
its rings, a clean slate 
it spins, scott-free
like how the specter portals

I coveted the labyrinthine
A night flicked loosening
A gravel-filled pit   still   a cloud
with too much rain
Charred remains make headlines
I uncoiled a snake from my neck    I mean a cordon
of blood-temples and canals    a shrine 
Sad eyes scorned like a crisis
A gesture between diapers and a postcard

I had a craving to swan
I pirated a midnight
The cracked marble the room remained itself    a hidden else
Wood warps unattended
That silver heart I bought you from Tiffany’s
That lapis heart from my favorite place on Bleecker 
Dust fills words nested in stone
Who knew my heart could squeeze so hard

You opened the oven looking for orange juice 
Sat shuffling little papers as if precious 
As if they could ever answer 
or order your world
How the order of things left you 
You asked what buttons were 
bra on blouse

The way daffodils curl your fingers 
The origami of a disease
How a body says   no

The way your eyes forgot my face

That day that last good day
Splatter searing neurons
On the balcony    tea and snacks in small words and the wind 
You said if Marty were here he’d have us laughing
he always did  that face  those jokes
it never got old
The weightlessness of joy

The weight of unlived life
We couldn’t have done anything
I meant to say we couldn’t have done anything 
differently 
How simple it is 
when our manifestos for distance 
have been forgotten

To know how to revive the dead
As if my idea of you could ever
As if any idea of you could ever even