The Small-M Mother

receives happily the rebukes of Rilke’s angels,
knowing how she imperfects
her each son’s epigenesis.
But she hate-watches the Sixth Elegy;
its direct address to the Fig Tree
and the Mother, as heroes scamper among them.

                           Here, the hero isn’t Immortality
but death out of time; not of its time; timeless maybe; or syncopating life; or
. . . but the hero has zero consideration of time.
Never stopping at love’s minor stations,
he rides his death’s tide in and out, easy
he does it and silver-gloved: a moonwalk and a moon
concurrently, high above the ordinary
scraps of flâneurs-turned-husbands, scientists-cum-florists.
Until small-m mother has a bodily fuck that.
Gestation was time fleshed out, undeniable,
and especially so when its end comes.

                           Here, the Fig Tree isn’t Sex
or Enlightenment—but conception, fatal.
‘Thousands fermented in the womb,
trying to be he’ . . . not the right rhetoric
for the mother who has lost or tossed
her certain number. All of them frankly primed for love.

                           The fig flower blooms inside the fruit, which has
a bejewelled orifice (kudos) purely
for the ingress of the fig wasp,
who must lay with blind fortune her eggs within
hermaphroditic—not female—fruit:
her offspring then copulate in their cradle,
and the males tunnel out and die,
and the females fly off in their pollen garb, flagrant and in thrall
to a co-reproductive fundamentalist worldview.
But if the fig wasp chooses wrongly,
her still-eggs are absorbed into a female fruit . . .
she never knows then promptly dies.
The mother (fuck that) always knows
and promptly, lives on.

                           The placenta, subterranean brain,
has no secrets or betrayals, only perfusions of pure give
and take. The mother isn’t being sentimental
only chimerical—foetal cells of the lost or tossed still
bespeckle all her organs. They are on her mind.
Each lordly choice that began there inside her