Genealogy

He asked me where he was when his mother was my baby.
I said, you were in mystery. I didn’t know,
couldn’t say heaven. I could say
you were your face before you were born.

Later, I was praying the last gasp of night prayer
so he would finally settle down, after the three books,
after the Three Bear and the Three Little Pigs,
after the boy, age three, held me like a spinning top

To see how long before I’d topple. After he hid in a hut
of straw bales, in that finale of prayer I said all sort of things
to God, out loud, as if I were a child alone, not aged
with this new child in my bed.

He’s from accident, the urge to life, unplanned
From a mother born out of Sufi dancing and peyote
tea, a father from Birmingham, two uncertainties who met
On the street of a ghost town and danced a little.
He came into body, danced out, The beauty of his crowning.
Every child, the old Jews say, could be Messiah.
He came from clear back to Russian and Hungary
And my husband’s Belgian work ethic, the pinpoint

At the end of genealogy. He’s from chance encounter. Rainbows
should be mentioned here. Beer and marijuana.
But all I could say was you were in mystery. Nobody
I know really knows. If they do they’re not telling.

I’m the great mother who gets tired. You’re the new engine,
American, I feel the way grandmothers feel
In times of war, tears under the skin, liquidity,
and you’re absorbing, without trying, all of me.