I had sworn I wouldn't write another poem about my mom but in the museum there is a room filled with centuries-old pottery sherds and it is difficult not to start seeing symbols everywhere. We walk through the frigid air toward a reconstructed temple, likely stolen, I say, and she looks at me. A rope keeps us from going further. Who are you texting? she asks and I want to scream but don't. What question could she ask that wouldn't make me bristle? I once called our fights a kind of dance in a poem I rightly tore up. I won't call it anything I tell myself in the poem I told myself I wouldn't write. I'd change the subject but resistance is a sign to go forward, I tell my students because something is wrong with me. So I go forward into what it might mean to struggle a few hours with the one who made me, whose dark I once lived inside. We step into the centuries between us and the vessels behind glass which once held water, grain, and now the silence of a light so gentle as to not damage the precious things. Copyright © 2017 Matthew Siegel. Used with permission of the author. |
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