Winn Dixie Parking Lot
with Adrienne Rich
In the parked car, finished, how little of me remains after shopping,
the consuming rewires, relineates the day’s horizon.
A younger mother orphans a metal cart between cars,
baby on her shoulder, all wail and wet wick, its tiny fists
clenched like dangerous pinecones.
I buckle myself into the chill of remembered horror,
the knot in my throat, denied, the shoulder barren, the end of it
all — no closer. I am the living mind you fail
to describe in your dead language, the lost
noun, the verb surviving. I am the aftershock Adrienne
promised, the kindred of mothering small mammals
is a public mural. A woman oiled over a wall, “Portrait
As Sponge,” daughter in the hourglass shape of her
mother, losing a voice before mirrors, a surface figure
on an unslaked lake. I watch us skate, the mother in
you seeing the mother in me. The we of poetry
must be bold as the gore of not looking
away. Or else electing to look back, addressing the subpoena
of stranded bodies, the open mouth of emptied wallet.
Babies grow into mammals who remember the worst
in a culture that damns the worry, the pacing, the forest
of things that hurt. We bury burdens in the soothing
emollient of kept secrets, the belief silence keeps
us safe. Tending flowerbeds of recent failure, we mother the deadened
nerves.
O sisters, what can I give you that won’t consume us?
Look — a culvert of cross-hatched homes bloom from similar lawns.
No respite when weeds are gone.