Mourning
I don’t tell my daughter about these ghosts. This doesn’t keep her from asking if the dead stay dead in their caskets, their hands folded in eternal origami, a broken-necked swan, a bear shot in the head. She draws their eager faces on the steamed-up mirror and they’re happy just to be seen again. They’re looking in the yellow bathroom warm with splashing water and sandalwood candles dripping wax onto my hands. The sound of small hands clapping. The dead are bright, looking in from a dark so long they’re miners crawling down my throat without lanterns, spines lined with stars, canaries to sing a last song to save the living. The truth, my grandmother told me, is our bodies are haunted, whether we invite it or not. By fallen mirrors or fireflies rising or some other type of spirit that can’t bear to live outside her skin, the way her body won’t live outside the earth it’s buried so tightly in. I want to keep holding my daughter in my hands like an Easter palm, a fragile, lavender moth that’s dying or terrified. First my grandmother died, then this baby slid out into this world too early, pulling with her my grandmother’s white hair. There’s something in you that breaks when your body fails your child, a sky splintering glass on the floor, one you can’t paint back, so many shards you’re still stepping on years later. When I sang about sleeping doves in willow trees, it was to both of them. When I sang, I imagined that when I die, I cocoon back into my own mother, dropped into the heart of her, in a field where what’s plowed is unplowed overnight. I imagine my mind the color of what I hate most about myself, that I’m always waiting for someone to die. My grandmother said the dead forget their names for a while. They mourn loudly like Victorians shaking their jet beads. We all bow our heads like nuns. If you can crush a creature between your fingers, but don’t, you love it more. Can you say your name? I asked my buried grandmother and my baby who couldn’t nurse the same thing. Parting my lips with her dried-in-fire hands, my grandmother stepped between my teeth, shaking her risen bones like she was at a party, hymning, I wanted to die at home. And I knelt, holding my baby as if we were still the same body, and this is why I mourn: because I go back to when I was a child watching spirits walk the walls, crying for blossoms made of water or light to put under my pillow, to lay my head on something real grown out of the dirt, so I wouldn’t feel so alone, when I cried for everyone I would outlive, headless ghosts squawking in my belly.