for my mother

Your voice crackles, sleet on the wire.
Days now, we wake in fevers, our limbs speak
garbled languages of ache and flush.

“I’ve been having my vision of infinity,” you say.
When I ask what it looks like, you pause.
You have never trusted words.

From other conversations, sound seeps through,
a woman’s question, a man’s laugh.
I picture you cupping the phone in your hands.

“Tell me. Is it good?”
But you aren’t sure. Perhaps a golden weightlessness,
rising and rising. This is what I would like to believe,
trapped in my heavy layers of flannel and socks.

Perhaps something else, something deep and falling.
Tell me where you go in these silences
and I will say if I have been there.

I remember, as a child, “The World’s Highest Suspension Bridge,”
and our timid steps, walking out a little way,
clinging to the rail.
Since then I have met a man who fell from a high building,
because he wanted to, because he dreamed of falling
till it was the only thing he could do.
He lived to tell reporters it didn’t hurt as much as
falling from a standing position or skinning a knee.
Now he wears moccasins without soles,
he moves quietly from room to room.
I have followed him, Mother, and I found out
he doesn’t know more than I do, or you, or any of us.

I had a vision of infinity I never told you about.
I was ten, on our trip to the farm—a sow was in labor.
You were all keeping vigil in the barn.
By myself I walked back to the house. A television was on,
no one watching it, just on.
I sat on the couch. For a moment between programs
the screen swirled an outer-space landscape,
stars and galaxies, dazzling miracles of light.
Suddenly something dropped—
it was the first moment I knew I would die.
I would not always be healthy, brown,
breathing easily inside my skin.
And then I fell farther, I lost my name, the month,
I traveled deeper than I had ever gone,
back behind the point where I began,
before I became someone knowing herself as someone.
I became that endless black beyond the stars,
knowing nothing, not knowing what it had not known,
and realized it was where I was going,
just as it was where I had been.
For seconds, Mother, or maybe minutes,
I was no longer your child or anything human
and then the screen changed and Walt Disney took over
and I switched it off and wandered out into the dark.

Listen, did you recognize me later, in the barn,
kneeling over the squealing pigs?
If so, tell me now, as I have told you,
how far your journey, how strange it is to come back.