The corporation of prophecies sends me a postcard on a Sunday.
This is the day I learn that my mother doesn’t live past seventy.
She suffers
from heart ache, and I wasn’t there.
I will hear from someone else that she
kept seeing her body moving into a field struck in fire
years before her passing.
That day, I would think of asking for
forgiveness on the telephone. But I don’t. There is a
day when a friend finds me on the station but doesn’t
look
in my direction.
I mark out these days on a calendar.
It’s August, but the calendar still says January.
Some day, the woman I couldn’t love
in the past would have her second child, and the father
knows how to hold the new-born this time. His face…
it’s almost as though he lifted a rock to discover spring.
You could love something this deeply, I never knew.
I write her a long letter about everything.
I wanted to tell her that I haven’t discovered the fall, I know it by
heart.
I know all about the animals that won’t survive the next season.
The last time I felt warmth, I sunk my feet in cold water.
The postcard reminds me of the day where I would stare at
photo albums of families that begin with smiling husbands
At their wives, and end with husbands
searching across a field and then a lake
For what was already lost.
There are very few things left
to store in
my hands. So, I rip apart the territory I was
birthed into.
This geographical map that I am familiar with has
suddenly lost too much land.
I know everything about the quiet morning drives to the grocery.
The radio will play the sounds of people talking gently,
of the wind between the grass that reaches here
Soundlessly.
Inside the car,
it’s still Spring. But the morning is yet to come
outside.
It’s March. I can almost see the afternoon light
in front of me.
I want to make amends, I say. I will spend more time.
I cut down on sleep.
I will read scriptures on impermanence. I won’t work so much
on a future anymore.
My mother likes gardening so we will buy new seeds.
We will see how the things we bury together under hard frost
grows
apart eventually.
We will look at each other and smile.
Not out of love, but out of acceptance.
I have counted every last day of this season,
secretly worried that I won’t be here to feel all of it.
Maybe, I have been too afraid.
I am afraid, because all the summers I remember
have become overcast in memory.
All I know is that the afternoon light is still so strong.
I hold my mother’s hand. I ask her to keep me,
if not here, then in memory.
Because something is coming, but it hasn’t reached us yet.
