William Baxter Closson, In the Heart of the Woods, c. 1887
Engraving
Courtesy of LACMA
This week, my daughter’s other caretakers–
the teachers who tend the bottomless lake
of her tears, who wear patience
like a slick new skin–
are reading fairy tales to her.
I dismay, hide from her the books in which
a darkness laps against the edges of the trees.
Does she remember our first, dull country?
A kingdom of plastic beasts
whose sounds we mimicked, asking each other
to make the cries an elephant makes? To keen
like a wolf prowling the back fence?
Have I been the unkind one, full of want, bewitched
and bewitching? Am I cursed, have I cursed her
and our weeks of sleepless fits? Each morning
she rises anew, calling out for me.
In the stories I keep from her,
forest creatures outsmart the sly wolves,
boil them in a cauldron set on coals.
The mothers turn villainous or die
from heartache. When my own mind slips
again into the blue-black woods,
I know she will one day understand
how a mother must bury her loneliness
in the thawing ground, the way elephants
toss branches over their young dead.
She trails behind me the way I yearn
to be followed. Does not want
to go to daycare. Kicks her shoes
off into the mud in the pooling rain.
Come here, I say, into my wilderness,
opening the dark cave of my arms.