it sits in wait

Some have children in more foreseeable ways:
Cesareans, episiotomies, long hours of labor
or paperwork, adoptions that often take years.
My girl, she came to me when the rope burns
on my brother's neck were still fresh from his hanging,
the noose tied up in the knots of her mother's

tourniquet, needles still cluttering the floor. Mothers,
I've been told, are not born but made--always
runners of the tight shift, leavers of the light on--hanging
one hat up only to put on another, their labor
of love still & always labor. What candle burns
at both ends & still lasts the night? We did not have years

to find our rhythm; we did not have yesteryears
to lean on or call up, nor succor, neither of us mothers
to phone with a thermometer in one cheek & the burns
of death's whiplash on the other. Some lose children in conceivable ways:
bee stings, enlistment, the bloody shock of difficult labor
that comes months too early & leaves every head hanging

in the waiting room. My girl made her great escape from a car hanging
upside-down over a freeway divider, all twelve of her years
broken into as many pieces, a puzzle of bone no surgeon's labor
could solve. Sorrow, I have learned, is long-legged like our mothers,
& stalks me with a glacier's patience. It sits in wait. If there are ways
of burying a body--still breastless & birdlike & fresh with sunburns--

no mother ever taught me how. If there is grief so torrid it burns
the mother out of you, I have known it. Her coat is still hanging
in the hall closet as if she, too, returns home with us on the subway
after stacking stones to sit by the window & stare. Years
ago, I dreamt she had broke free of the soil, face--like her mother's--
pale as a bar of soap. She padded into the kitchen to belabor

the leaky sink: its quiet drip that refuses the plumber's labor
& remains, like a stray dog at the door. Sometimes the sound burns
like sun through a magnifying glass into the middle of my mother-
less dreams, tapping at the ache found pregnant & hanging
between the ticking second hand of the mantle clock. Years
of sometimes have made me cautious of bus stops & railways

& other laborious intersections of bodies & speed. Unchanging
now, like my own mother, I am afraid of sleep. Instead, I layaway
& awake in the burn of night, my womb a bed no one's slept in for years.

[Meg Day 'Taker of the Temperature, Keeper of the Hope Chest', from Best New Poets 2013]