Who among us has not been hungry? Who among us has not been vulnerable? Who among us has not been a starving lion? Who among us has not been a prey animal? Who among us has not been a predator?”
“My Mother’s Body” from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time // Marie Howe
Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,
grew louder. From inside her body I heard almost every word she said. Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing
the pedals of the blue car, her voice, first gate to the cold sunny mornings, rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs . . .
Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone. Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,
and my body hurt her, I know that—24 years old. I’m old enough to be that girl’s mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant frightened eyes,
her bedsheets stained with chocolate, her heart in constant failure. It’s a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me
with her mouth, first grief, first air, and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother,
slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it, across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.
Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers, our voice in my throat speaking to you now.
Let others dispose of questions, I dispose of nothing, I arouse unanswerable questions, Who are they I see and touch, and what about them? What about these likes of myself that draw me so close by tender directions and indirections?”
I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my enemies, as I myself do, I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself, I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me, I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.”