How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, Arshile Gorky
79.
1 My god: the haranguer lays his hands on sawdust & word
& house shines w| sebum
& saints lay in cold blames
2 the copses of our pine have gone to pulp & drone over fretted cells
meddle over the veins of rosin
fiddle over the brooded wax
3 & turn dark in a stain of travel as perceptible & discernible droplets
in a denseness of disease & loneliness
massed as Theia in Earth’s orbital path.
4 We have killed our children more than our neighbors & they laugh
behind our backs as we push ourselves
front & center in the landscape of lenses.
5 How long: Lord will cedar & willow & oak blaze
as white blooms of cloud drift above?
6 Will we feed cane into the mill for sap boil sugars (down)&3 to the salts
plow dry stalks into fallow fields?
7 For our fears to-fret a leaf of sons & swallow rains in their soil alone.
8 O: remember not our walls black w| incline: let the calf suck & be cut
our scalps bleed red through the mourning:
rich as nations.
9 Help us: my god of salve for the mud of our feet on flooded land:
deliver our essentials
& purge the house.
10 Wherefore (the new)&2 say: Where is the house?
Where is a second letter?
11 Let us be known next to a sacred ox grazing under the hickory withes:
12 as roots of a child turn to xylem & shed to foundation.
13 Let symptoms of the lastborn be found at a foreacre
let arms be raised under the spell of a nowthen vision
make choate my flesh
& open heaven.
14 & open only fourfold a veil of reproach to our haranguer
he turns from the pages of a matrilineal book knowing not our chapter
or verse: O Lord.
15 So we seen flames rise from our wellspring & our mothers
spoke of their shame
16 so Lord: wilt choose one to show a hope to generations?
