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Writing Summer Nights Once I saw my new mother standing in an old night sky when I was three and felt full of the world, but her belly was infinite and always brilliantly hungry for children. My mother carried a rock in her belly then, so heavy and perfectly round it looked like the moon when she was naked. And I was each star circling around her, everyday a different constellation. Like a pet I named the rock Elizabeth, who, like the trickster of my own myth was born and transformed herself into a boy when we weren’t looking, and I had to share my mother’s words and sky, while days skipped by like stones across water. A womb and sky stretch many miles, and both produce twinkling eyes. Stars only fall when my eyes prefer the fallen, tiny glowing star-babies or lantern-bugs that sit in my palm and light up the future, then fly off to write humid lullabyes for a tree who can’t sleep, or the tattered blade of grass trampled by the dreams of children who begin their games when the world stops. In the summer, with my mother’s sweat still swishing about in my nose, I write about flowers while my brother the baby writes while he sleeps to send it all away like a shooting star, but it is still summer where everything melts and rests. Although dark, I see the round night sky burning with the path of stars that flow like liquid down tan skinny legs until a pool has crept up into the sky like night, and I see the moon like the head of my brother turning his face because we created that myth, not him, and I want to remember, and he wants to forget, what writing won’t let us. He began with the pencil like a cord and paper smooth as fluid before he even had brilliant eyes like stars, and I when I was only the pattern of a path to follow. We wrote because we had nothing from which to continue, yet felt like the great night sky as old as always and pregnant with summer. She might not have known it but now she will: that my mother and the sky at night in the summer are always pregnant with stars and children. Lisa Schoblasky This poem is appearing in the Poetry Journal Premiere Generation Ink. Summer 2001 |
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