Slope by Jerilyn Kass

Slope

Your sloped shoulders
Are the long ride down
I took starting at fourteen
Longing to take a ride of my own making
But not knowing it until I saw those slopy cliffs
Off which my descent would last and last

Your love was a ride down a road
Bumpy from the potholes which shook my brain
It took me to another land
Where the language was strange
The rules so incomprehensible
They engulfed me
And when I came back home for visits
My first language had become unfamiliar

I could not even look at my own family
For the shutters over my eyes
Blocked their sunlight from my broken windows
The doors I’d opened to my own humiliation
Closed those to real love
The way I’d given myself away
Was too much a secret
To share with my old familiars

I was the paper you ripped
But I gave you my fibers
How do you tell your mother where you’ve been
When you have no idea yourself
When there are no words because you don’t yet speak this new language
And there are no tears because you’re still dizzy from the spinning
And there are no hugs because the fine spray of paper fibers,
Which were once a smooth sheet of parchment
On which to scribe life’s joys and mysteries and pain,
Might seem to bridge the distance between my familiars and me
But really crash like trucks into my chest

I see you but I can’t reach you
I hate you but I need you
I miss you now like I’ve missed you my whole life

This is a child’s pain
But I am still a child
Even though I’m forty-six
And your memory is waning

You are my mother
And I’ve needed you
In a way I could never have you
And you’ve needed me
In a way I couldn’t give
And here we stand
A country apart
Each in our longing
What have we not said?
Will those words pass our lips
Before you pass?

I hold the burden
Of ruining our family
There were secrets before mine
Pains cradled like a child born but not revealed
Mine wasn’t the first
But its effects still linger

Linger finger finger me for blame lame leg shoot me dead
Dead head the flowers so new blue true ones will grow grown groan grow
Up would you grow up already steady now don’t ruin it
Ruin ruin rue in true in truant where are you where did you go
What is true in being truant what to rue
Should I rue what is true
Truth in ruin
Truth in ruin

What is ruin anyway
But the cracking open of a foundation
Weak with hidden portraits of grief and glory
Unfulfilled dreams and unanswered prayers

What is ruin
But our bedeviled skin
Turned to mounds of ash
That, in turn, hide the jewelled heart