Vanished.
Gone without a shadow
left behind,
until my child unlocked
some secret door in me
and through it pulled you out.
You have not altered,
but still the doubt
of who and what you are.
When I first felt your absence,
I combed the moted corners
and my mind,
but you had gone too far
for me to find
and call you back.
I knew you once.
A long lifetime had passed
before my own womb
answered what I asked
of you.
All that was left
were yellowed snaps,
from someone’s ancient Brownie,
of your smile-toothed gaps
and shreds of faint
ancestral-borrowed traits.
You were locked away in attic trunks
beneath Great Auntie’s headaches
and Grandpa’s khaki pants.
You were tangled in puppet strings
and ravelled satin ribbons
and all mixed up in heaps
of dolls with missing arms.
Remember hiding Uncle’s wooden limb?
With grinning innocense, denied.
But when I gave it back to him,
you cried.
Where did they pack my childhood?
Climbing Grandpa’s fruit trees,
hiding with rattlers in avocado leaves,
we slid down the stretched-out days.
You, one-hand-in-the-jam-pot,
gone now with dust and eucalyptus-haze
to cover your errant tracks.
You came for the fun,
hid for the trouble,
and returned to dry my tears
with childish laughter.
We were recognized by all as one,
but it appears
you’re long forgot by all
but me.
“Never pick green lemons”,
my Grandpa’s only rule,
but you played deaf
and reached from Grandma’s stool.
And Grandpa smacked my infant pride
there in the orchard
where I stood tied
securely to the ground
by the lemon in my palm.
And you? Were gone.
How could I explain,
when you were my breath,
that I was not to blame?
I was a child,
locked into my Self and speechless;
you had only the tongue
of an impulsive heart.
You kept all my essence
with your own, silent and apart.
I never heard your truename,
though I asked;
nor saw your face,
though yours and mine were same.
You disappeared the instant
I awoke, and yet I know you watched.
And as I stretched my swanning form,
you grinned.
But not once did you look back, surprised,
from the mirror,
from my woman’s eyes;
nor did you ease the leaden-footed way
I pathed.
Until my own child laughed.
You hovered on other planes
in some odd dimension
that I could sense and smell and taste
but never reach.
Which one of us did Time impeach?
You? Or something I once was?
Others have come in your stead,
but they only filled the space
and not the emptiness.
Yet I never saw a trace
of what you were until too late
for me.
In birthing I forgot my quest
to find the geometric grave
wherein you rest.
She came, my child, in crimson thrall
and cried through my fogged pain.
I knew then.
You had come again.
You dance with fireflies
on dark lawns at night
and gurgle your old mirth.
She, your mistress, with her birth
has called you from my soul.
I hear your soundless singing
in my core,
and in her eyes
at last I’ve seen your face.
I can forgive your going now;
though no penitence can erase
the sight of your mouth,
puckered from green lemons,
or the tears wrought by the taste.
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