Of Color of Landscape of Tenuous Rope 

i.           

I’ve pulled from my throat birdsong like tin-
sheeted lullaby [its vicious cold        its hoax of wings]
the rest of us forest folk       dark angels chafing rabbits-
foot for luck     thrum-necked     wear the face of
nothing       we’ve changed       the Zodiac & I
have refused a little planet little sum for struggle & sailed
ourselves summerlong & arbitrary as a moon grave
across a vastness        [we’ve left the child-
ren]      Named the place penni-
less motherhood      Named the place country
of mothers      Named the place anywhere but death by self-

ii.           

infliction is a god of many faces      many nothings     
I’m afraid I’ll never be whole     I’m afraid
the rope from the hardware store [screws for nails]
will teach itself to knot      I’ve looked up noose I’ve
learned to twine but these babies now
halfway pruned through the clean bathwater of childhood
I promised a god I would take to the ledge
& show the pinstripes the pinkening strobe-
lights maybe angels chiseled at creation
into the rock [around my neck] the rock in the river
I would never let them see        I would never let them

iii.

break & spend a whole life backing away from that slip—
Let us fly & believe [in the wreck] their perfect hope-
sealed bodies the only parachutes we need
Credit

Copyright © 2019 by Jenn Givhan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 15, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“I’d become a single mama when I wrote this poem, and on the radio as I drove, sobbing, toward any ledge in New Mexico while my children were safe at school, came the pop song I now sing on repeat with my babes: Rockabye baby, don’t you cry (I’m gonna rock you)… It felt like a sign, dug deep, and as I wound off-road through the dirt and rocks, I recalled the time we took the kids to the Grand Canyon. They were maybe three and six, and they said, in muted tones, from their stroller at the chain-linked edge: Is this it? They’d expected a ferris wheel, I think. Fireworks. I’m determined to hold on, for every day, for the grandest canyon or the most ordinary of moments—with everything in me, I’ll get my children to the other side.”
—Jenn Givhan