Rigoberto González
May 2010

The Mortician’s Mother-in-Law Says Goodbye


At 70 you’re still capable of the grief that wipes
its tears away with both fists. The sadness of little girls
never grew old in your eyes or in your throat—how it

hiccups rehearsing the same melancholy sounds.
Sorrow, you have learned, is two-fingered: V-shaped
it shuts your daughter’s eyelids, adjoined it blesses

forehead, heart, shoulders, lips. Your granddaughter chased
another child around her mother’s coffin and the loose
ribbon on her waist made you cry because the white bow

it once was was your creation and what a brief life it had.
The scissors, seamstress, that cut the shrouds of many,
lay cold as a pair of bovine nostrils widening against

barbed wire. You saw the cow freeze to death that winter,
and when she died she died standing, stubborn to the end
that old hide, drawn to your window by that flickering lamp—

a discard from your son-in-law’s parlor.
Perhaps she had the power of the third eye, mesmerized
by the ghostly shadows of the blue hands drawn to the warmth

like moths. When the dead hold the light they
realize it is what is not them and they begin to love
the darkness that is. Old woman, you surprise yourself

tracing the last touch of your daughter’s hand. It was here,
on your left breast. An awkward place, but it was not
the first time it had felt her grasp. When she suckled

as an infant it was there she reached for first, the warm milk
leaking from the raw button of your nipple. The ache
comes back to haunt you and you push it off discreetly

with your elbow. You wonder if this is how the body
begins to die, remembering its courtship of contact
and desire, moving memory back to the first sensation.

Then your daughter is here inside of you now, pressed
against the pink walls of your uterus. Slowly she
escapes you, unpeeling foot, skull and spinal cord—

you’re feeling clawed, stomach turned, insides shredded.
And just as you’re about to scream, your daughter disappears
completely, collapsed into the small implosion of your phantom egg.



 

First appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review (V 7, No 1, Spring 2007)

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