Materna

1.  Nominative: Accusative

                      "The Accusative is the direct object case, 
                       used to indicate the receiver of an action."


In the place we grew up, 
a mountain road snakes
over twenty miles 
into the lowlands. 

The first time we descended into the city
with you, pinpricks of light spasmed
over bridges: garlanding billboards, 
choking islands of shanties. 

I don't remember how 
we found our way to a neurologist
and that room in a hospital basement 
where a nurse worked feverishly

to attach electrodes 
to your forehead and scalp, 
while you whimpered under 
a haze of Benadryl.

If a cathedral spire 
was visible from a window
or if a stench of refuse 
wafted in, I do not recall. 

If a thumbnail, named
after the mezzaluna of the thumb,
describes the press of a small
sickle, a concise impression—

then what I remember 
is how the power went out
across the entire city just as you
grabbed the network of wires

in your small fist 
and pulled. We drove
back up the mountains then,
knowing nothing more

than we did 
before those nights of in-
consolable crying, mornings
of brief, lucid seizure; and in

between, first steps 
on the green, green lawn, 
letter+letter+letter+letter
= ease of words 

prismed like bubbles 
into the air. I do not choose 
which memory to turn around 
and around like a small

blue stone in my hand or how 
it's shaken out of its pouch. I don't 
expect either of us to understand 
the depth of space into which 

our history fits; how it also turns 
around and around, insistent key 
which doesn't care which way 
the grate swings open, 

or how wide it opens. 
For anyone rounding the last 
few miles, a stone lion comes 
into view: its natural granite color 

thickened with clay paint
from a store, as if anything's 
true nature needs softening
or masking. Lion 

or lioness? Ruff
circling the head or throat,
milk coursing through 
bewildered ducts. Now

I move through days with little
sense of mythology. My thighs,
through which you passed, thicken 
to the texture of crepe.

The question asked of me 
so often has to do with regret.
But even before any of that,
don't we already know? We 

swing out of time as much 
as into it, as soon as we arrive. 
Can we become gentle again 
to each other after that?