When I first stand up to my mother, when I am fifty--and on a civic issue-- she changes, as if she's been waiting for someone to lead her. She does not mention the beauty of her blue eyes, but says she has been sorting her late sweetheart's clothes-- and it BREAKS my HEART , she cries out. and then she cries, as if she has been lowered down into a river of music. I'm not unhappy, she says, this is better for me than church, her voice through tears like the low singing of a watered plant long not watered-- and now it can be heard, her fear of tears, as if they might take her far back to something like the swimming of the flayed in the flay. Now she lets me hear the music of her self--I could be in a cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could be a young or an ancient mother. Now I hear the melody of the one bound to the mast. It had little to do with me, her life, which lay on my life, it was not really human life but chemical, and approximate landscape, trenches and rea...
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