See Me Slant: Poetry Considers Her Mother

Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.

—Virginia Woolf

I am a woman who slants. Standing, I lean into my right hip. When I catch myself doing this, I realign, redistribute my weight, and establish that poise my mother would be proud of—standing as if a book were balanced on my head, my neck full of understated attitude, my eyes focused on an object across the room, hips symmetrical. My mother insisted that I practice this posture, the dictionary resting on the crown of my skull, shoulders fluid, my gait as smooth as suede. I crossed the room several times as she watched, and this practice always occurred in silence, as if spoken words might topple all that vocabulary just above my head. Whenever we went out in public together, my mother, taller than I, would bend slightly and whisper, "Stand up straight."

My mother gave me this body, the one that slants while standing, and she worked hard to ensure that I'd have a voice of dusk for those words that teetered on my head, along with the common sense to pause and rearrange myself when aslant. She gave me practical advice—where to dash, how to shape my nails into commas, what style to wear, who to date, when to use a period. And when I was older, my mother instructed me in the art of reading between the lines, and how to catch (as if they were fireflies) the words that live in the mind. She showed me how to care for my lips so they'd be useful, and how to keep my tongue clean so as not to disturb the ecology of what I tasted.

I grew up in my mother's body. On the long, wide savanna of her back, I pretended to be grass. In the fertile crescent beneath her breast, I hid like a turtle. At the twin beaches of her thighs, I invented waves. I browsed in the orchard of her hair. Found safety in the coves between her toes. She offered me these landscapes connected to her body, along with a universe beyond—the constellation of her mind and the momentum of her orbit. She could fold herself into a boat simply by wrapping her arms around me. My mother comprised all these dimensions at once—the place of arrival and point of departure, the act of journey, the vessel that affords passage, the North Star that guides.

As a child, I listened carefully to my mother, watching her mouth as it shaped what it uttered, imitating how she touched her lip in a coy-mistress kind of way as she hesitated to locate the perfect word, my ear against her chest as she fashioned a sentence out of thin air. She was always leaving language around the house for me to find, asking me to celebrate ordinary things like fish houses or oranges, and to consider extraordinary ideas like the design of an oyster or the curve of time or the progress of a beating heart.

My mother divided time into stanzas. Matins we sang to the breaking day and last vestiges of starlight. Before lunch, we washed windows and banished the dust, setting the house in order like any mother and her daughter. She showed me how to organize the bureaus into sonnets, folding 14 articles of clothing mixed in color and utility into each drawer. How to iron out the wrinkles and sew on the buttons. Afternoons, we painted haiku on the bathroom mirror and looked at our reflected faces webbed in the 17 syllables of our design. At twilight we cleaned our pens, repaired the spines of books, and my mother hummed a tune for the rising darkness. It was always at this hour, the moment between day and night (the hour when a wolf might be mistaken for a dog, as they say in French), that she rested her teacup on the table, leaned toward me, and told me things she knew. Like the true names of the birds. Or that each person I encountered...