Rooted

Posted by Victoria Ford | Filed under '11 Fall: An Opiate Utopia, Poetry, Print

Rooted
Victoria Ford

Because I come from a winding road of women
who still collect the tragedies of love in their hands
like the doorknobs they’ve turned upon one another,

and because I grew sick

of pressing myself beneath the half-hearted embrace
of umbrellas each time it rained,

I started wearing my hair natural.
And now, days like this
it seems I’ve tossed my entire life away

attempting to weld myself into a straighter past:
I wanted to forget

the scars breeding above my mother’s shaved head
after my father came home smelling

like all the other women he had loved.

And perhaps, still loves. Although it should make
no difference since after he left, my brother
left. I left. But

whenever I visit my mother at the
department of social services, for the single hour
we share together, when she reaches her neglected hands

to cup my face,
I know she’s bothered that after all these years
she’s been so far gone

she can’t recognize the scar
roping around my neck as even a scar at all.

And as I watch her outline a cheap, violet stain
to her own lips, with patience like traces
of children’s fingerprints to my brother’s

forehead. Mistakenly to the half-eaten rim

of a Styrofoam cup, I think that this family
silhouette, too, can be a sort of painful beauty.

I’ve begun to realize the most beautiful things
God drew with his fingers are knotted,

misshapen somehow,
as trees and young birds are often born.

I want that. The hunched shape of a weeping willow
when it surrenders nakedly in fall and still

bluebirds choose to sing on top of its branches.
It doesn’t ask anything from anyone and never needs any permission.

I want her to believe that we are women who still
deserve to be cherished as toddlers in diapers swaddling
are cherished when they take their first steps. Carefully lifting

one fat leg over the other, each roll
spinning up their skin loosely like cotton candy.

And if I had the chance to say to her I want you, mom, to know

we were never meant to be stretched straight as silk chords.

We were never meant to allow chemicals or men or bitterness
to tamper with our napped & knotted beauty, I would.

But for now, even the room still soaks in her small knitted frown
the way browning apple skins tossed in the waste basket,
by another family,

settle into a newspaper clipping,
a crumpled court order,
our pasts–all forgotten by now.

Which is an easy thing to do when we don’t consider
that we’ve got roots with troubled trunks

and the same thunder storms we’ve locked ourselves
away from rattle inside our own hearts.

Because whenever I visit her, our mouths stay open
as if we’re trying to say something that we can never quite reach.

And our mouths hold a scuffled O that hasn’t
found it’s voice yet, but sounds a lot like an answer for

my brother sticking a teardrop thumb into my mother’s
mouth, between two sharp teeth & asking,

Why, mama, do you got, so many

(gorgeous, I want him to say)
holes?

Comments off| Other posts by Victoria Ford| December 15th, 2011