Cloud Moving Hands

The Temple of Our Dilemma

47 At the temple of our dilemma women bathe the water stone children they could not carry into this life, the ones no one but they remember. The water stone children wait to be born into another body, wait out the years, unseen, unformed, unnamed, at the bottom of the river. The years go by and they remain tied to stones, unwanted. They appear to be asleep, the blue tadpole patches of eyes are translucent pools of sadness. Their mothers, seeking forgiveness, call out to them at the water’s edge. Voices, strong as the muscular current, pull them into the delicate rim of morning that clings to earth like a tear. In this way the temple exists, its blue dome shimmering, breaking open into sky as the women, hands cupping grief, lift from the water a stone they will hold in a ring of silence together. � The Temple of Our Dilemma 48 The women gather at the river to bathe these children who will never grow, while their brothers and sisters, the bone flesh children, live above the water, peering from windows murky as ponds. Firm in the certainty of schedules and shoes, the road that curves where the yellow bus turns, the bone flesh children march to school, bite into soft white sandwiches, learn to recite the multiplication table that will enable them to take up residence behind assembly lines and cash registers and cubicles in buildings with swift glass elevators. Before the bone flesh children stir, demanding of their mothers something sweet, the women slip from unmade beds, the groggy mess of spillage—broken yolks and soured milk—to tend to those who will never ask for anything. They thread their way out of the night and into the river’s light, their pockets heavy as if already weighed with stones. And in the inverted dome of wisdom they, too, are held and washed and mended. ...