A Metaphysic

                                                               "...What I want
is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more."
                                                     - Lauren Camp


The answer to anything I ever did wrong
as a child was often a question: Do you want me

to return you to where you came from?
Whether I broke a dish by accident, refused 

to practice my music or perform on demand;
had the impertinence to unsheath the clumsy

new blade of my own tongue— the sentence
fixed me, bore its underlying threats: unmooring,

undoing. Not until decades later would I learn
what my mother must have meant: the secret she

tried so hard to keep from others, about how
I issued not from her, but from her sister. 
 
How should we imagine the physical space of our
origins—a room, a cell, the corridor of an hour?   

Its actual potency shimmers like a silk 
cocoon, a paper lamp shade; a metaphysic. 

As I write this, she is trying to work her own way 
back into those winding threads, the pulsing 

womb of that first or final hour, while other hands 
deliver what sustenance she still requires.