Something Forced

4 6 Y S O M E T H I N G F O R C E D B E N J A M I N S . G R O S S B E R G the amaryllis bulb. That’s the verb we use: forced it, its petals just one shade more pleasing than blood. Do I mention the year it lay dormant, or the spears’ thin green arrowheads, their announcement – why not my mother’s exhalation beneath the pot, her ghostly avatar opening its chalk line of a mouth, expelling what was once breath into the bulb’s white fist, coaxing it open? And Dan – two dates in – loved me. Briefly. Her entering him, too, parting his shoulder blades like curtains, reaching a vapor hand, finding and soothing the contours of his heart like water running over clay: making slip – that’s the word, clay and its diluted self, rounding, softening edges. The week he loved me was good. If my mother’s soul couldn’t do more than that, well, she got the vessel turning. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect me to do the rest. What the cat sees in her cat-staring? Something, certainly – don’t you, cat? Or hears, one ear rotating outward, body otherwise still in a still room. If I don’t move – not even a breath – 4 7 R that balance keeps: everything still but whisker and soul dragging the gray lace of itself across hardwood floors. When I told my mother I’d bought acreage out in Ohio, she raised an eyebrow and said, I can’t see you as much of a farmer. I guess we never had much faith in each other. How can you see me, Ma? Hard as I try, I can’t see her as a soul. Not some white transparence brushing my cheeks. Silly me, thinking it the new salve, Metrogel, finally clearing the rosacea she and I shared on our similar faces. Anyway, why would she look so closely after me in death, when, in life, she never had? When all she’d done – and in a selfish way, a mostly selfish way – was love me? ...