Egg

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
        - Louise Gluck, Mother and Child


You and I are solitary birds. The last two laborers.
Maybe we don’t always know who we are.
Even our shadows melted together.
            We made up every polished stone
            in this mosaic.

At first I didn't know how to live
outside of the world we carved out.
                                That astonishing garden of nowhere,
                                those deep lakes inside a mother.
Those vertebral train tracks.
The dark canvas landscapes
                               we used to wander together.

How do I keep from returning
to the ghostly oleanders in our arboretum?
They keep bending back and forth
promising to open.

                      What would it take
              to grow a garden in me?  

There are days I feel some empty canyon
inside me, pulsing
                                  like a lighthouse
             and I miss the years
             before my childhood.
When I was still a nothing egg,
                               coffined in your side,
                  and we never were apart.

Then after that. Every morning
              was chamomile and maple syrup.
                          The color of your hair
         in the winter sunlight. Your careful voice
         like notes from an old record
                                      that float across a dusty room.
You never did wash out of my clothes.

Those things that happened,
                 I had meant to move through them by now.
But such a cold river of grief ran over me
that I couldn't remember who I was.
          It was your voice
          that told me: this is who you are
and pointed at my grief.