Don't Read This Poem (An Invitation)

 

My daughter calls from the other room; she's found a family dead.

All dead, all but one small baby hidden among the bedding.  A family

is dead in my room too, leaving another orphaned baby.

 

Don't read this poem.  My teachers told me, don't say that.

Don't mention you're writing a poem.  As if the reader,

dear reader, won't notice.  And don't say anything weird.

 

Over the top, they would say.  There are rules in poetry.

I always seem to break them.  Perhaps I also shouldn't mention

that I am writing this on red

 

paper.  Blood red.  What I picked from the scrap bin, coincidence

or synchronicity.  By the time you see this, though, the red

will have turned to white the way a face loses its color in death.

 

Two families dead, two orphaned babies.  But they aren't people.

We're in the animal-care rooms in the museum's basement.

The babies are mice, one tan, one maroon, both just starting

 

on the first hint of hair, eyes sealed shut.  Orphaned.

Of course, they will die without their mothers; we all know that.

They're not weaned.  But I am, so why the fuss? 

 

Okay, I'm an orphan.  But, I'm also a mother.  I put the babies

in my blouse to nurse from my own breasts.  Could you just not

read this?  I know you'll disapprove, but that's what I did.

 

It's sort of circular, really, since I'm the orphan now.

But I'm sixty, my parents both dead at eighty-three.  No infant, I.

In the dream, the babies grow to the size and shape of ferrets

 

and move inside my silk blouse like snakes, undulating, sinuous.

In my black velvet skirt and blood-red jacket, I hide myself

from everyone so these babies can nurse and live.

 

I am the orphan baby.  I am the snake maiden, I am the mother,

I am the grandmother.  I am as tiny as a newborn mouse

and I am the crone slipping into the grave. 

 

But you knew all that already, and knew the dual nature

of my Geminian twins, the yin and yang of me.  Even,

perhaps, the strange depths to which I'd sink to survive this grief.

 

But did you remember that you had a breast and milk

you could offer an orphan?  If you've gotten this far,

you could hold me.

 

 

Mary Stebbins Taitt

070206c, 1^st Tuesday, February 06, 2007