Rebecca Hawkes, Ramshackle, 2013
Oils on wood
Courtesy of the artist
Artist Website, Instagram
You’re weary, your head aches & you drag your heavy body out of bed to wake
your daughter before dawn. You believe you are half-failing every last one—
not just people you love, but earth’s children: golden eagle, white trillium. Half-failing.
Half-falling. The days echo one another. Evenings, each tired droop marks
another futile family dinner, & you corral your small daughter upstairs to escape
an unrelenting noise. Let me write you back into your skin, kissing first the bones
of your weathered fingers as they drag their shadows over the page. As a child—boundless
in all forms, how easily you ran naked in the yard, how natural & free, your bare chest
plum-juiced & shimmering. I’m holding you like then—your girlhood belly, skin to limb
in the mystic magnolia. You sang as you entered the tree, as if climbing a billowing ladder.
You cupped the robin’s egg, the dead opossum. It was your clovered voice that rose
from under the weeping leaves. Hold on. I am stringing you a row of stars from a hidden
trough of sky, I am spooning the black soil over your toes. And into the sorrowful place,
from which all longing came, I am breaking open the wound & restitching—
honey tongued—adding flicker’s feather & green nettle. Let your body
with its caravan of night-sweats ride into the starspun—call it a dream, then lay your lush
form down in the yarrow fields. Because of you, your daughter is learning them
by name—columbine, blue flax, dandelion. Because of you—her pocket full
of meadow stones. I’m cleansing your rivered belly with the great river, I’m scattering
your tired breasts with a handful of jasmine—the milky swell seeps
from the stems where they are torn. This life—so much you wanted, so much you never
asked for. I will love you all the way to the end.