My Mother Was a Muse
Que sera sera was a song
that my mother sang to me
before I had crawled onto the trailing skirt hems of the future,
pawing my greasy mits all over the lady’s velveteen curtain,
lolling my head back on its hinge,
gaping mouth to suck it all in.
I became steeped in a hot lap
suffocating with this new possibility,
this breathed-in clot of pending:
the future tense,
the sera,
the belief that my mother designed exactly what was going to come
out of her.
My mother was right, what will be
has been.
Eternally,
in her maternally tired face, she contains the torrent of what will be;
she will be
a god in her girlishly tensile flesh
which knew how to wrap me as a clot in the cot that was her rib cage.
It is a blessing after a year of her air,
a year of in
and out,
to no longer exist only to breathe each breath and
not to wonder where it passes,
but to exist in the glory of the foreordination of my mother's song.
My mother was the muse of my future breaths.
The god to grant me more sweet tastes of those swirling invisible kisses
bursting against my palate,
a poison grape.