Adrian Blevins: If the Universe Sends Me a Grip

I’ll drop my Ajax and say something else, but this is about how
my full-to-bursting motherliness—my pasty yield to the sweaty troops
of me and the dad in the bed and me and me all-milky with the rainy children
in the bed—was not stupidity and was not psychosis

no matter what the braincases thought back then

since like everyone else they’ve got to die and hover in the milieu,
making now more actually about how the saints are going to exonerate even the braincases

since like everyone else they’re fragments of salt and the dust of fish:

ghoul spit on the thigh with a real life to lose but no human honeycomb in a crib
to float around at midnight and not-lick but near-lick

since the divine stillness of a child is the very death-defiance motherhood is all about

since it’s impossible but not really but maybe given how now is in point of fact
the waning time of me going in the opposite direction of full-to-bursting
since I’m too old to grow a baby and moreover too wary to scatter myself to microscopic pieces
like I had all the time in the world. And the money and the grit. The cockamamie lovingness.
—

From Live from the Homesick Jamboree (Wesleyan 2009) by Adrian Blevins.

Reprinted by permission of the author.