the amaryllis bulb. That’s the verb we use:
forced it, its petals just one shade
more pleasing than blood. Do I mention
the year it lay dormant, or the spears’
thin green arrowheads, their announcement—
why not my mother’s exhalation
beneath the pot, her ghostly avatar opening
its chalk line of a mouth, expelling what was once
breath into the bulb’s white fist, coaxing
it open? And Dan—two dates in—
loved me. Briefly. Her entering him, too,
parting his shoulder blades like curtains, reaching
a vapor hand, finding and soothing the contours
of his heart like water running over clay: making
slip—that’s the word, clay and its
diluted self, rounding, softening edges. The week
he loved me was good. If my mother’s soul
couldn’t do more than that, well, she got
the vessel turning. It wasn’t unreasonable
to expect me to do the rest. What the cat sees
in her cat-staring? Something, certainly—
don’t you, cat? Or hears, one ear rotating
outward, body otherwise still in a still
room. If I don’t move—not even a breath—
that balance keeps: everything still but whisker
and soul dragging the gray lace of itself
across hardwood floors. When I told my mother
I’d bought acreage out in Ohio, she raised
an eyebrow and said, I can’t see you as much
of a farmer. I guess we never had much
faith in each other. How can you see me, Ma?
Hard as I try, I can’t see her as a soul. Not
some white transparence brushing
my cheeks. Silly me, thinking it the new
salve, Metrogel, finally clearing the rosacea
she and I shared on our similar faces. Anyway,
why would she look so closely after me
in death, when, in life, she never had?
When all she’d done—and in a selfish way,
a mostly selfish way—was love me?