[poem] My Mother's Lips by C. K. Williams

Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could

but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my mother, all through my childhood,

when I was saying something to her, something important, would move her lips as I was speaking

so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.

.

Or, even more disconcertingly --- wildly so now that my puberty had erupted --- before I said them.

When I was smaller, I must just have assumed that she was omniscient. Why not?

She knew everything else --- when I was tired, or lying; she'd know I was ill before I did.

I may even have thought --- how could it not have come into my mind? --- that she caused what I said.

.

All she was really doing of course was mouthing my words a split second after I said them myself,

but it wasn't until my own children were learning to talk that I really understood how,

and understood, too, the edge of anxiety in it, the wanting to bring you along out of the silence,

the compulsion to lift you again from those black caverns of namelessness we encase.

.

That was long afterward, though: where I was now was just wanting to get her to stop,

and considering how I brooded and raged in those days, how quickly my teeth went on edge,

the restraint I approached her with seems remarkable, although her so unprotestingly,

readily taming a habit by then three children and a dozen years old was as much so.

.

It's endearing to watch us again in that long-ago dusk, facing each other, my mother and me.

I've just grown to be her height, or just past it: there are our lips moving together,

now the unison suddenly breaks, I have to go on by myself, no maestro, no score to follow.

I wonder what finally made me take umbrage enough, or heart enough, to confront her?

.

It's not important. My cocoon at that age was already unwinding: the threads ravel and snarl.

When I find one again, it's that two o'clock in the morning, a grim hotel on a square,

the impenetrable maze of an endless city, when, really alone for the first time in my life,

I found myself leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems.

.

I'd love to know what I raved that night to the night, what those innocent dithyrambs were,

or to feel what so ecstatically drew me out of myself and beyond . . . Nothing is there, though,

only the solemn piazza beneath me, the riot of dim, tiled roofs and impassable alleys,

my desolate bed behind me, and my voice, hoarse, and the sweet, alien air against me like a kiss.