Be Holding by Ross Gay

Author:Ross Gay [Gay, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822987826
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

in my hands

the grandmother

leans against the doorjamb

made of thick timbers

with an undulating grain, pierced

periodically with knots,

like the tear-stained

eyes of elephants,

like terraced fields or

wakes ululating behind a vessel,

her chin is up and jaw tilted just so

as though chewing, or maybe

running her tongue where a molar used to be,

or contemplating a taste in her mouth,

or preparing to spit,

or looking for a clod

of clay or better yet a fist

sized rock to smash in a thousand shards

the looking

this camera wants to do

to her boy

capture him

for she knows

for the insurance,

for she knows what they could do

more than anyone,

she knows what they do

more than anyone,

and her muscled forearms are fortressed

across the diagonal striped pattern

of her dress which toward the knee has two holes,

and suddenly like that her dress becomes

a map of the trades,

the holes the bodies

of islands cast in the windcombed sea,

and beneath the dress

a short sleeved lace shirt,

the collar of which elegantly droops

atop the diagonals,

and you will notice as well

on a loop of string circling her neck

a key somehow not where gravity would pull it

but poised almost perfectly

opposite her heart,

and just behind her,

from the darkness

a child

peeking out

looking out into the distance,

which might be the distant eye

of this camera,

which happens also to be,

now,

this poem,

and though she doesn’t

touch the boy,

the boy is hers

my own white mother

how many times told

by white people

that brown child is not yours,

that curly-headed sun-loved thing

you nursed and whose ass

you wiped the shit from

and whose very body you bore

of your florid gore

(at which, for the record, my mother here

would say, That’s a little much, Rossy),

the many knives in her body,

in her mouth,

my mother did not know were there,

sharpening, until in the supermarket,

standing in the checkout,

some woman, some white

woman, staring at my white mom,

alabaster in a daisy-speckled sundress,

in Painesville, Ohio,

my brother riding shotgun in the cart,

me on her hip,

head tucked into her shoulder,

away from the looking,

probably making almost a face

of disbelief, as she turned round

and round in her mind

the impossibility

of this maternal scene,

no calculus to accommodate

what she’s looking at,

her brow furrowed in stupefaction

as she cranks us round and round

in the petite aperture

of her white

imagination,

and my mother by now

rocking the cart back and forth

a little faster, my brother dozing

from the rocking, all the while

holding me on her hip,

and seeing

the not seeing,

Mom opened her blade

untenderly to the gawker

trying to fix us

by looking up from her TV Guide

and, in a voice

approaching the Luciferian,

counseled,

Yes they’re mine

and I have the stretch marks to prove it,

and cut like that the eyes

from the woman’s head,

her reflection

disappearing for now

with the blade

my mother methodically folded

and planted into her pocket

with the other daisies

grinning on her sundress,

my mother and her knives

make a garden,

one of the many linguistic varieties

of the more familiar

what are you

what the fuck are you

looking at

which utterance

can also be discharged

as a look

in the Arkansas sun,

for you’re the one bought the aviator hat

the child wears,

pulled snug,

the long flap on the right side

framing the tender line

of his jaw,

the face somehow of a dreamer

which you in this photo

do not seem to be,

though put the dream

of flight

on the child’s head,

which he leans shy into the doorjamb

for he too

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