In the country of my mother’s birth, miracles and sloths keep to themselves. In the weeks I spend looking for some sign of her, the rain persists with its genius for mud and birdless afternoons. Butterflies, people said. Ladybugs, people said. Songbirds, they all said. My mother would come back from the dead as something bright and winged. Nothing came, so I went where the message might have gone. Not my home, but her first. At the villa where I’m staying the goliath spider sits in its terrarium, quiet as a conscience, even as I tap the glass.

*

Once, on an arctic ship a man gave me what the dictionary called love, what the thesaurus called more trouble than it’s worth. I didn’t know then my grandmother had died in her sleep. My mother told me by email, but didn’t say, Finally. There was nothing left of her anyway. I did not dream of her. I looked at glaciers, whales, and the carcass of a seal. Nothing visited but flies.

*

Inside body, my son says, his ear against my chest. He lifts my shirt to find the heart he listened for. When my son spit up red milk in his first days, it was my mother who rubbed lanolin on my scabs and told me not to fear. I wanted to pinch the colostrum between my thumb and forefinger and drink the blood and gold myself, to keep my son safe from harm. But I trusted her. I rubbed. I nursed. I waited to heal, my tongue swollen with undammed God and No and Please, the timeless and sacred expectation that good is coming for us. Ours are the doors angels pass over.

*

My mother’s best friend said her heart failed because it carried too much unforgiveness. A fire burned in the restaurant’s fireplace even though it was summer. I stabbed the wilted spinach of my salad and nodded because betrayal is that easy, because the dressing made the greens shine, and the taxidermied duck bolted to the wall was not listening. Someone else could say my mother’s love came easy but not her forgiveness. I hate God for how he forgives. For who. A mother is archetype and exhaustion. A holy father is verbless vengeance and a dead son.

*

A condolence card said, You don’t have to want to be alive all the time to keep living. On the floral cover, a monarch in its last and loveliest form, but this could not be my visitation. Surely my mother’s spirit would return in some second life. Some caterpillars have rudimentary wings tucked inside their bodies before chrysalis. Each transformation, a trauma.

*

Here in the country of my mother’s birth, I mistake the dusk’s bats for possibility, mistake the mãe da lua’s stillness for a message. What has more to hide than a prayer without an “I”? I am trying to summon the strength weeping requires. I want to keep my mother with the talent of whales for housing reluctant believers. I’d buried her in a vault to keep her body from rising with the water table, to keep her as bone, as ghost, as if even cement and desire could drive the voice of God to another hemisphere, as if fire’s weightlessness and potential for ascendance was not her first lesson, as spark, as instinct, as alive as my son who presses his face to the oven door and says, Can you turn on that light so we can not see that nothing? And nothing fell through the dark like a cradle.

*

Forgive me, Mother, I am tired tonight, here in the flightless country, where I decide to forgive the past because you couldn’t, because I don’t want my heart to become yours—some cautionary tale among friends at cheap restaurants. My husband pulls some strange flower with a hundred lips from its tree. I try to guess its name, try to imagine you chose it once, too, a girl in love with beauty, wanting to imagine some of it for yourself. It becomes nothing in my hands, and I remake the image to answer the need, imagine it whispers all night as my husband tries to summon me away that many-lipped mouth with a single tongue lapping the hairs in my ears with the truth of you: gone, gone, gone, gone.
___

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade, Our Lady of the Ruins, and Rookery. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

Photo by Lauren Crux