Before she had to leave, my mother planted the wisteria, tangling
enshroudment softer than hair at its corkscrew ends.
It crosshatched, for us, like a kind of telephone cord
extending a thicketed umbilicus
I suspected, then knew for sure
when I heard my guardians say how it was bad.
We’ll hack it back, they said, behind the house; I heard,
in late autumn, their serrated blades sawing.
I used my thumb to gut its seedpods down their seams
collecting the coins, brown or green
I pretended could purchase, if not freedom, then sleep,
a deep sleep where God would be and speak: yes,
I believed things then, like that. The night was a womb
where language could be born and born.
For all my looking, in spring,
I never saw a bird from childhood sip,
but there are many drinking from the flutes above me now,
wings blurred as they hang on the air and hide
their tiny faces in anesthesial masks. Perfume
darkening down the snout of tapered blooms
weighted like grapes in a painting: frosted
looking, cascading from the invisible
hand of a woman in a frame
enslaved to proffer as long as the paint lasts.
If I close my eyes, I’ll hear her humming.
I do not close my eyes.
There are two hummingbirds
the size of infant feet, so small, the pair of them, spiraling
up from the vine then spiraling down
to brake at the blossoms near to me and drink—
What does it mean for a being so small
to drink deeply—
The hummingbird’s spinal cord is a telephone
ringing. I pick it up, hello? A moth, common
to what some ancients called the Old World,
darts through daylit ruins near to Rome.
Birdly bug on just the other side of the inner/exo-
skeletal divide, uncanny likeness, just as big
and flitting in the hummingbird’s style—one grazed my face
then hovered where a gray stone shin once broke
the air, in the ruins; shin of a soldier, lost;
gone all the body but the toes, arcing digits
on the pedestal, side by side, like a dismantled jaw,
two sets of teeth. One mouth. Worlds groping forth.
My entry was paid for. Students called me Mother.
Bird or bug, mammal or plant: the categories bore.
Down and up. Likenesses exist. Like many snakes
in the late spring heat, what was consumed by the roots
bursting out of the head, like my own thoughts
revealed to be my mother’s
evolving toward the public and grotesque.
There’s a child in me, listening to this.
I am born, adult as now,
slowly, painfully; I strain breech
from what were those ancient soldier’s toes,
reaching up
to touch, with my
lips, the hand of my
mother, or
to make the fall
I’ll fall longer
when
forward
off that plinth
I tip
I intone
The angel in my eyes
named Loss, delights
the angel in my eyes, named Loss, delights
the angel in my eyes, named Loss,
delights the angel
in my eyes named
Loss delights the angel