Matrilineal Descent

Not having spoken for years now,

I know you claim exile from my consciousness.

Yet I wear mourning whole nights through

for that embrace that warmed my ignorant lust

even past intimacies you had dreamed.

I played your daughter-husband, lover-son, to earn

both Abraham and Ishmael's guilt

for your indulgence, and in time, reproach.

Who sent us to that wilderness we both now know,

although I blamed you for that house of women

too many years. But Time is a waiting woman,

not some old man with a stupid beard,

and when I finally met my father I found him

arrogant and dull, a formican liar

with an Austrian accent. Well, we meet

the phantom that we long for in the end,

and getting there is half the grief.

Meanwhile, my theories rearrange themselves

like sand before this woman whose flaccid breasts

sway with her stumblings, whose diamonds

still thaw pity from my eyes.

You're older than I thought. But so am I,

and grateful that we've come to this:

a ragged truce, an affirmation in me

tht your strength, your pushiness, your sharp love,

your embroidery of lies—all, all were survival tools,

as when, during our personal diaspora, you stood

in some far country blocks away,

burning poems I no longer sent you

like Yahrzeit candles in my name, unsure of me at last

who sought a birthright elsewhere,

beyond the oasis of your curse,

even beyond that last mirage, your blessing.

Mother, in ways neither of us can ever understand,

I have come home.

Source: Monster (Random House, Inc., 1972)