Spontaneous Generation

My nerves wince

because Amma’s hair is

silver-veined,

increasingly.

Those bloodless strands

are fecund, mitotic

as cancer. Her words

divide and multiply.

I listen, though the words

divide us too, and

phone lines are never

umbilical cord, and even that

Dr Ko scalpelled apart

nineteen years ago.

My mother is the only person I ever entirely

wanted to be.

I

have never had white hair.

Upon my scalp

the snow is dandruff.

You tell me

my hair is so black

it is blue, like

your eyebrows,

like Krishna, lover but never father.

Your voice stays arid, though it breathes

white letters towards the sky.

Last night

it snowed so much that

Yampa field became that sky.

I think

of sky and you and I, and am afraid

of blood and of

the act of generation.

My grandmother studied

botany, named plants and named

my mother, who grew

in her womb, but last

year something she could not name

grew also, and she

faded like your voice, uncertain in the day.

I long

to draw water through

xylem, strand upon strand.

Nothing

grows in the sky, but still

it gives birth.

Though

my eyes are pregnant, the

delivery never occurs.