☀ Today's Poem: "Palinode" Michael Prior

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August 18, 2021

Palinode

Michael Prior

My mother is stalking cabbage moths
with a tennis racket. She looks
most like herself when she tenses
then swings over rows of kale and romaine
at the white specks floating through
blue shadows. She is bisected
by the swaying frame, distanced
by the poor resolution of the video
my sister just sent. Her left hand
is bandaged: tendonitis from picking
caterpillars and eggs off the leaves
with chopsticks. As if to prove
obsession is its own lineage
I have spent hours checking the sun-
stunted shiso for iridescent beetles,
bodies tufted with fine hairs
like the down on a dandelion seed,
spent years wondering what it meant
to be her or her parents, uprooted,
dispossessed. I can see so clearly
time's possession in the way I speak—
like her—the preference for detail,
for impossible control, how my skin
has pocked and wrinkled, the gray
growing up my temples. I am thinking
of the time she was enrolled in an ESL class,
even though she only spoke English;
the time she told me on the phone
that because I had left, I couldn't
come back; the time I stole twenty dollars
from the jar under her bed; or all the times
she corrected my pronunciation: repeat:
indistinguishable, inconsolable, inevitable
that I won't return home for another year.
By then, she will have stopped dyeing
her hair. There are no equivalencies,
only echoes. I am alone and watching
my mother watching something above
her head. My mother is swinging
and missing. My mother is crying
for her mother. My mother is referring
to herself as Oriental. As old.
The cabbage moths arrived on the coast
in the late 19th century, just before our family.
Now, these shimmering beetles
are weighing down the leaves.
When I look back, my mother
has become indistinguishable
from the shadows under the trees.

from the journal THE SEWANEE REVIEW

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"Poetry Today: Victoria Kennefick and Madeleine Wattenberg"
"I know a lot about poetry now that I didn’t used to know, but I think that young poet knew something I no longer know—something about that edge where language meets the elements before canon and category and theory. She didn’t have many ideas about poetry, except that her heart felt a little bigger when she wrote it."
via KENYON REVIEW

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What Sparks Poetry:
Heather Green on Camille T. Dungy’s Trophic Cascade
"Camille Dungy is both an outstanding writer of the 'natural world' and one of the most deft makers of metaphor working today. Her metaphors refuse to let the reader rest in their connections, but instead create a kind of friction in the mapping of vehicle onto tenor, an incongruity that invites the reader to follow the various threads of implication in an unlikely pairing."

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