“A Reverse Elegy (wherein the hands of the clock are the hands of a baby who has yet to discover she has hands)”

“In another time
I knew so much about you.”
—Agha Shahid Ali

I remember you well, mother, fluming like in-bloom magnolias
unstitched by wind, to the August sauna of our Honda. At St. Michael’s,
two nurses, ever brisk and white, quiz you on the cause of time — how heavy
was the luggage, when did the bleeding begin, where is the father, why
are you weeping. I set a silver Shiva by your shoulder, clasp your thrashing
hand, and we wait. Many years later, we call only once in a while. I am
having a child too, I decide to tell you. Pixels flicker into little stars
on our screens. Womb-time is far from Zoom-time is far from
dream-time. We could be back knee-deep in your birth from hell,
or you gadding into the breast pump a scarlet milk trickle that was
meant to be an ocean by now. Now, you are quiet as a hungry fox.
Silence is useful to concatenate grudges. I collect tears like milkdrops,
rub my eyes so hard all the dark deliquesces into light, golden phosphenes
bleeding into the blue-whale sky. Finally, you suggest I rest until my water
breaks. You’ll feel like you’re peeing yourself! And when you give birth,
you’ll literally shit yourself! Despite myself, I laugh. To give birth
sounds so terminal, ineluctable. As though after the birth is given,
the giver must now move onto other things. As all mothers do,
eventually. You’ll always be my baby, you told me as you held the new blue
wrapped infant to your breasts. How did we drown mama, or does everybody
return to this black wet womb, abyssalpelagic, lonely, but fossilled with
everything that once made it out, crawled, swam, leapt through the surface,
and morphed onshore, hunchbacked, then standing up straight, then gazing
into the other blue abyss above? Which is all to say, when did you forget me?
I am pushing, squeezing, pulsing, engulfing, burning, dithering, cursing, fissuring.
Still she is born half-and-three-quarters dead. I don’t take any of your phone calls.
I have left the hospital and she is still in the hospital beehived in wires and drips.
I left you in the hospital that first night. I was fifteen. Forgive me, I did not know
you might need a daughter. We all need our daughters, you will say to me when
you see her in my arms three years after the sea almost claimed her. Today I can
remember you mothering a small ocean for me in your palms, fork-feeding me pieces
of the moon, medicating my nightmares with shushes and soon, everything resolves
on its own. Back in your home with its wing-swarmed birdbath, the maples and oaks
a stairway to heaven for squirrels, the overgrown milkweed in the corner where there
was once coriander and a sandbox, the rain-stains on the concrete from an old swing
we occupied once, the magnolias, wolf howls and cricket song at midnight, and now
the three of us, mother/daughter, mother/daughter, daughter, rising like a syzygy.