Mother to Son

Mother to Son

I: Annunciation:

I had to look it up, the meaning of it,
which, considering the quickening

is really only three months maybe

after he took me without me being
there (ok i was there but i wasn't, i let
myself out the door while he

banged and banged) so we make it
make sense by making it holy.  And hasn't
it happened to you, even if you don’t admit it,

trusting instinct for a second and then

second guessing, holding the test

to the keen illumination of scrutiny.

And doesn’t that cheapen the authen-

ticity? or at least the trust of it, how

impeccable we want everything

to be, especially the future, by virtue

of it not happening yet, the sweat

of inventing, the salt of it

not even touching our lips let alone

our teeth and tongue or the back

of our throat, oh true holy uvula

on course for vibrating, there’s no

mistake, the same way, and it’s a shame

to have to say this but take it

as true as a vein in the marble arms

of the entwined mother and child,

the dead man limp now, riven, the woman

remembering (if we make her, because, right?

we’re the lookers on) the circumcision,

the torch of Simeon’s finger on her

blue mantle, how it scorched straight through,

how it left a mark (if we were to lift

the marble, did Michelangelo scrape it

there?) if there were to be

any doubt, how she touched it  

seldom, or never, but that it pulsed

inside her anyway like a sister

muscle, the only light in the room

at night and he away later those long

three years and it never ever not once

stopped glowing and Joseph,

dead by then and entombed and the rest

she never had

to look out for or into or beyond,

mortals they all were, impressed

to their shallow days and not

for a second seeing the road in front

of them all pocked with rocks hauled

by slaves and the sinkholes dug and kept

wet and open-mouthed, sunk enough for any

animal in the dark to fall in

and never again gain light not ever

squirrel, or snail or, find the cool

of the day a snake, the obelisk

like behemoth miles and miles away

still in its ontogeny, still embellished

still rooted, all in the dark, a virgin to anything

like an awl or a saw or a plane or the boxy

shape it will be made into and remain

but she knows, touching it as she walks

through the grove, how she groans

(but only inside, beneath Simeon’s thumb

print) and glows and nobody else knows

it’s her future and it’s his future

second by second by second just barely

(because she’s carrying a god) out of sight.