Stephanie Pope

Carravaggio, Narcissus 1598-99
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

She hesitates
In stillness waits
Oh my soul

My weight's repose

Repeats about her head

Where my eye born blind

And breach and inward bound

Re-turns itself in you

Oh my soul

Dare I trepid

Sojourn nearer yet

Oh my soul

Dare soothe the pulse

Repeating in her breath

Her thirsty lip grows parched

My faint of face bends low

And begs upon your doorstep

Oh my soul

Mother Artist

Once, long ago there was a larger
aesthetic that contained her value
incised upon stone and bone and
breast…she spoke a milk language then
it made a space here inside for
birthing; a tiny tear, a baby doll, later a
caesarian scar; de nous en nous
which means, without her, there is no story.
Surely the ancient chevron voice must
still trace in me that boundary between
us, slippery like tea a thousand years
tasted along a liquid edge of double
sided imaginary. Her touching me
touches everywhere…and nowhere
across time, signifies everything that
she will have been at once…making
nothing appear. Yet, her spirit fills in
across time the substance of this art.

Once upon a time I loved a mother and
hated a motherhood. Somehow both
things slid away from me like a tear
into a crack of childhood. Some things
flow outward and unsayable, steam in
airy curl and reveal in the trace an
other face barely there, only
sometimes…and only when I remember
to leave room for it. To experience how
she touches me that way, I have to
leave room for it.

Over coffee now I sketch the
possibility of us within ourselves
breathing with steamy nostrils the
absent shades of her ancient rhythms
rhyming me to suit a Neolithic taste for
another kind of life-giving liquid (her
world never entirely diminished).
Always, a greater life like the absent
liquid shapes familiar still her
substance…and I struggle to ask
things unanswerable (although they
have never really been entirely
spoken…by her…by me).

Truly, I tell you no language is ever
neutral. So the baby doll is always
container to a life-giving moisture

While she, without being here, still
suggests it. The other mother’s life
till suggests it; that the world is a
hand-me-down through the human heart

And what each lives is no bigger
nor smaller than what lives there, given
the space for it…given the flavors are
irreducibly different.

©2004 Like A Woman Falling Selected Poems, The Alice Series: Myths of Wonderland

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