Daughter

The heavy bed that belongs to my mother
in the room at the end of a short hallway, breaks
into spokes of light. I let myself in. I touch
the mirror on her dresser and all of her gold.
In a photograph she sits by herself on a beach
with blackberried hair and no baby.

My stomach balloons out with a baby
in a dream. I am glad to be a mother
and I know from the baby’s spine— a beach
rounding off a continent until it breaks—
that I am having a girl. But the sun stings gold
through the blinds and I wake up with no one to touch.

You look happier then I say to my mother as I touch
the photograph of her before she had a baby,
before she had three. The words sift like gold
between our wooden chairs. No says my mother
just less tired. In another room a song breaks
into static waves. They wash us, we become beach.

A thought hovers like a kite at the beach:
We would have a baby by now, my hands touch
the invisible thread of it, if I wasn’t on birth control. Breaks
of silence before It’s hard to get pregnant with a baby,
he says, but yeah we would have one by now. My mother
stands tired at the sink. All of our china chipping gold.

I remember the dust in the air spinning gold
as she cleaned. A little light at the beach
after dark. I remember once, my mother
broke a sculpture that we knew never to touch.
I hear the elephant’s head crumble. I rock my baby
doll, glad that I didn’t do it. Again, the whole world breaks.

The plant under my neighbor’s porch breaks
up the stone. It survived the winter, under the gold
drum of streetlights. Spring comes in small baby
breaths and hours from the coast, we remember the beach.
I remember it in November too. We lean into touch
for warmth but I want to go back, I tell my mother.

There is no baby yet. My mother wades into the sea at the beach
until the water breaks at her chin. She turns back into the gold
covering of the first dream where we touch and I name her mother.