Namesake

From the face of the earth
is how they put it
when someone disappears
so all day your father paces
among bulldozers and cranes
as your mother sits in the car
muttering to the visor.

I hang in my own mother's womb,
little turtle, zeppelin of skin and marrow.
The chipped ice she craves
grinds in her teeth
like pneumatic saws.

And because television that summer
will be the closest thing to miracle,
she gives in to the sloppy recliner,
to the window fan's rattle and clack
to watch as hour by hour
hope fails in black and white.

Down there you must have heard something queer.
A scraping at earth, some ancient burrowing.

And what word can name the descent of midgets
armed with buckets and spades?

You lived two days, your voice
tamping at the surface, that one song
rising now and then into the suspended mike.

Then—air, light. The blood
hammering at the soft closure
of my skull, they lifted
me out, all slag and sediment,
sludge of another life,
and gave me your name.

©Cathy Smith Bowers, 1992, 1997.