Today my mother was born to her mother,
six decades ago,
though I do not know her.
I have looked into her eyes
for some indication of love
and found them glazed with brown liquor,
though still impossibly green
like the sea under a high sun.
Searching into them, you would not notice
you were drowning.
You might neglect to wave for a savior.
To look at her is to know what achingly beautiful
means, on its seeming surface.
I loved where I would never be loved.
The only way she could let herself look at me
was as if I were fractured by water,
a blurred resemblance of my brute father
four decades ago, though she did give me
a horse figurine, this horse breeder
who can loosen her heart only
riding the back of something fleeing the scene.
I would shatter it later, alone,
against the impassable ground between us.
I, the horse breeder’s daughter, would both
multiply and demolish this one gift
and its fragile frozen mouth,
its nothing to say, its inability to say it,
just as these years alive both accumulate
and lessen us, a disappearing act.