And Blacksilk Hair

AND BLACKSILK HAIR

Long eyes turquoise and slanted. A goose gutted on the lakeshore, insides pinkly twisted. The way wind reminds you of tangled hair, strands inseparable, damaged by the twist. Wash of the waterfall, half sigh half wail. The bags under her eyes, the pooch of her bloated belly, liver spots on the exposed parts of her when the experimental medication was the only thing keeping her alive. That photograph with its

yellow trees. How once she sang you to sleep but you don’t remember the words or the melody, only the tenor of late afternoon light slanting across the pillow. The pinch of the word mother, so frequent you’ve grown used to the bruise. A row of weeping birches. A row of pink blisters on the wrist. Homes where you’ve worn out your welcome. A paragraph that can’t continue but does. A paragraph that goes on and on until you lose track of where you started, so you go back,

perpetually re-reading the first sentence. No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. The way, after having been approached by a man in the woods insisting on a blowjob, you sit in the car and cry, and the crying goes on long after the fear has left your body. There is no gap between traumas, such as losing your mother first to drugs, then losing her again to her death at the hands of a man. Smell of soft pretzels, the sounds of a skating rink. How

you over-identify with dead bees, dead geese, dead snakes, dead frogs; how every death belongs to her. The wind and the ocean and the color of Opal Creek belong to her. Blue cars and long braids and stray cats belong to her. The smell of rain on the cement, the mist in the mountains, the Rose Parade, rehab, the roundness of the moon, crying into the curtains backstage, hot summer nights with the window pushed open—no screen separating you from the night’s panic and press—And what doesn’t belong to her should have. How getting older means

looking more and more like her every day. You look for her in cemeteries though she wasn’t buried. On street corners. In words. You sometimes find her in mirrors, just below the surface of your face, but when you lean in, she scatters. You

will never stand in front of Multnomah Falls without feeling abandoned. You learned to shut doors rather than watching them shut on you. You make mothers of people who don’t want to mother you, you cringe

at a gentle touch. Half in half out

always. Half underwater, half your mother’s daughter. Swimming beneath the surface: something you can’t make out. It has to do with the way a beaver’s teeth never stop growing, how they chew and chew and chew

to keep from dying. The way you live in silences, in doorways, in flux. Not quite an orphan and not quite not. Between

mothers. I found and lost them and was born to one and she is hardly mine. What I make of her. Neither real nor wrong nor ever really

mine. How do you write an elegy made up of things that don’t belong to you, things you can’t describe with precision but only in blurry half-strokes? I am trying to remember her, Mother in the bedroom mirror, combing back black hair to make room for the question of eyes. I see you, I say firmly, as if by saying it I can make her materialize as she was, earth-bound and nothing to do with the ache I mistake her for.