My grandmother straightens
and stands stock-still
among the dust motes, busy and golden—
making biscuits
before the afternoon’s cold window.
It is very long ago — her youngest child,
the one who will grow
up to be a beauty, gurgles milkily
from her crib in the corner away
from the black stove and the table.
The other four are in school or asleep.
My grandmother has never felt
the house so still. She has stopped
rolling out dough, holds her breath,
and is becoming the winter light herself
because of the other light
starting inside her eyes,
fear-tasting light that spikes
and shimmers and amplifies
the baby’s cooing into shrieks
of the peacocks her uncle used to breed
until they died of bad temper.
The light is familiar and weird
as the first sickness of her
pregnancies. Should this even matter,
this farmwife seeing light
that isn’t there on an ordinary
afternoon? Or me, writing these words
around the dazzle and blur of my own sharpened
light? Grandmother will flour her hands
and go back blind to her baking,
she will feed the stove and boil
the just-plucked chicken in
its glimmering pot. The children will
come home, wake up. Her husband
will arrive as the light in her fades
into something keen and narrow.
She will serve up supper, hold hands for grace,
and set the oldest girls to washing up before,
carrying herself like antique glass,
she makes her way
alone to her dark room behind
the stairs. On her cold quilt, she will lie
in the moonlight while the shining
needle of pain probes her eye,
the voices from the kitchen
rasping faintly against her socket.
She cannot quite sleep. I want
her to reach out her hand. It will be decades
before I glimpse the shimmer of pain
and think I’m going blind. But I’m here, cold,
making a poem of her shiny darkness,
the same needle drawing the blood
she gave me. Grandmother, reach.
Now. It will help if you hold my hand.