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Tropism


This morning as I gave the ivy
a half-turn on the sill
so that none of the limbs
might falter, light-starved,

I remembered the other agony,
the aching turn toward the source,
each time I lay down
in bed with my mother
and try to touch her – 

She's back from the ward.  I've come back to her
just ripened, the first seeds
bursting from the stalk of me
as I lift the blanket and
gently

curve my form to hers.  She's lying on her side.
I touch just her arm
–  If only I'd thumbed the arc of the eyelashes,
if I had lightly grazed the down of her thigh,
even ah the sweet juncture of my mother's members – 

She has so lately come from Death.  Like the good child she
swallowed His pills, let Him feel a breast.  How else
shall I win her
back to this world?  How

but through my kisses on her calves
and wrists, each
motion of kiss forgiving a slap or a rending,
have I ever woken my mother back into
her body?  But

when I stroke her shoulder
she edges away.  Even now
this stuns me.  Even now I want to
beg her
to shift a little closer, or pat my clutching hand.

Not to move away.  Not to stir, look,
turn aside.  Is my touch
so paltry, so
feeble?  Did they lop her off at the very core?

There is nothing I can restore.
Since then, my bed is empty.  Withered.  Sere.



Imago


Frankly, the thought of something coming out of my nipples
horrifies me. It's this idea I have

about intactness: I want my body
sealed. Or, I think of the body

I inhabit as a sealed thing, the container
of me. Long ago I deduced

the me and the body
were separate entities, my mother in a square of sun

astraddle and shaking my body,
as one shakes dirt from a rug, though

crying and blood-suffused from
the look I'd given her, from my refusal to

speak. Which I continued, practicing
as I gazed at her

eyes' flecked amber, her Russet-Red hair undulating in the air,
the long-branched veins of her neck

delivering sap over the course of her –
an anti-maple tree –

over the drum-noises
of my head knocking against the floor

I'd think, It's just my body;
she can't get

Me. As in, she can't make me come out
from the container. Think of a pupa

fleshily waving from its pale cocoon.
Or that X-Files scene, where the black oil,

the essence of intent, forces its human host
to his knees, that it might

go home. And now the me will be leaking out,
pouring, apparently, onto the unscented material world,

as well as into the being now spinning itself into actuality, inside me.
Sometimes, though, I wish I could hear that magnifying whir

of the fetus, meaning little one,
its swallows and sighs. And though it's just my body

producing the infant, it does so with such
animal devotion, weaving every filament so as to ornately span the gulf in
the forest.

And it's my body, the arms and shoulder-sockets,
that throbs, that craves

to clasp that naked being to me, back and forth, back and forth.

SHARON KRAUS' new manuscript, Strange Land, was recently selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series; a portion of it was recently a finalist in the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. Her book of poems, Generation, was published by Alice James Books in 1997. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly, Agni, Quarterly West, Barrow Street, Cortland Review, and forthcoming in ONTHEBUS, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

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