Remembering Kitchens

They kick and flail like crabs on their backs.
Parents outside the nursery window do not believe
they might raise assassins or thieves, at the very worst
a poet or obscure jazz musician whose politics
spill loudly from his horn.
Everything about it was wonderful, the method
of conception, the gestation, the womb opening
in perfect analogy to the mind's expansion.
Then the dark succession of constricting years,
mother competing with daughter for beauty and losing,
varicose veins and hot water bottles, joy boiled away,
the arrival of knowledge that eyes are birds with clipped wings,
the sun at a 30° angle and unable to go higher, parents
who cannot push anymore, who stay by the window
looking for signs of spring
and the less familiar gait of grown progeny.
I am now at the age where I must begin to pay
for the way I treated my mother. My daughter is just like me.
The long trip home is further delayed, my presence
keeps the plane on the ground. If I get off it will fly.
The propellor is a cross spinning like a buzz saw
about to cut through me. I am haunted and my mother is not dead.
The miracle was not birth but that I lived despite my crimes.
I treated God badly also; he is another parent
watching his kids through a window, eager to be proud
of his creation, looking for signs of spring.

Thylias Moss, an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), is author of numerous volumes of poems: Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, Hosiery Seams on Bowlegged Woman, Pyramid of Bones, At Redbones, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky and Small Congregations. Her memoir, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress, appeared in 1999. She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her poetry--most recently the Whiting Writer's Award, the Witter Bynner Prize, and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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