GENERATIONAL LINES
-!
Looking through dimensions,
mirroring generations, I see
myself through your face.
The same blur-grey eyes you gave
to my mother, light brown hair
moving in around your aging face,
soft pink lips shaping words
I can't understand, they are
all mine.
fTC I trace the lines
defining your face,
beneath your eyes, around
your mouth.
You said each has a story, each
a name.
Mine, a small fracture,
lies along the border of your hair
and face.
Pointing to the deep crack in
your forehead,
you say as it swallows your face,
"This one belongs to your mother"
over and over to a small,
% pale, grey-eyed girl.
You said I'd inherit these lines
with your wedding band and
your pain,
but I have my own, and yes
there is one
with your name
across my fresh cheek. If I must write to you
it will be of things
that do not count.
A resume of bloody
knees, thunderstorms --
Christmas Eves.
Paragraphs to cite
Incidental things.
I almost drowned when
I was two.
Eight months later,
you arrived -- jaundiced
yellow, cultured
in an incubator --
small chance survival,
would we have fought
so hard if we knew?
Small town
(I know now with distance)
eyes peering into closets,
kitchens (our closet
our kitchen) sizing up
threadbares, paltry provisions
sisters speaking of things
that do not count.
I pull you onto the sandbar,
your skin as cold as surf,
veined blue.
Helpless slapping
face and wrists --
taste of salt,
shivered sand. You
breathe. That is enough.
Inconsequential things . . .
Ruth Dominguez
These poems were first published in Soup, a literary journal at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.