Pascale Petit: Jaguar Mama

Jaguar Mama

 

1

 

Once, she was the giant jaguar of my prehistory,

carried me tenderly between sabre teeth,

 

licked my rosettes until they grew lush

as treeferns draped with black orchids—

 

the whirlpools and rocks of her tongue

almost pulled my skin off, I never knew

 

if she was grooming or preparing to eat me.

Her eyes were oxbows in which piranha shoals thrashed.

 

My painted warrior, who retreated into the wetland

as her power waned, the symmetry of her face

 

fissioned into a Bosch triptych, wrinkles over her cheeks

like demons no powder could conceal,

 

demons cascading from the mouths of demons,

wrinkles wielding pitchforks.

 

 

2

 

Sometimes I’d glimpse her drinking her reflection

or reclining on a sandbank as if it was a chaise longue,

 

a Gitane dangling from her lips like a rolled up rainforest

she’d set on fire during one of her rages.

 

Give me her rages, her running rampage down the street

naked, rather than this drugged beast

 

the goldminers taunt, that tourists pay to gawp at.

Give me her razoring stare, the tinfoil glint

 

in the killing pools of her eyes, not this stingray infested

swamp bordered by bats, mosquito-cloud

 

cataracts over her eyes. Give me

the mother who runs through the estate

 

showering money at kids, who unpins tenners

from the flames of her hair.

 

 

3

 

Hold that high, a pale-winged trumpeter’s tremolo

vibrating through her even while she sleeps.

 

Who knows what they dream, these patients

on sleep treatment. They descend to an understorey

 

bristling with ants, get stung but keep sleeping.

They don’t eat for a month, haunted by hoots

 

of the night monkey. Then the howlers start

their dawn delirium. First one, like the door

 

of hell wrenched open, then others

and it’s a gale ripping through a ship, until

 

the whole selva is convulsed. The inmates

try to reply but their throats are stuck.

 

Light, when it filters through her eyelids

is the oropendola’s waterdrop-note, a nurse

 

 

4

 

shaking her arm to say your daughter’s come to visit.

I entered the hospital like a fawn who must be sacrificed.

 

Better to be torn limb by limb alive

than to be rowed over the stagnant lakes of Mother’s eyes.

 

Give me a telescope’s safe distance

to view the jacamar perched on her saline drip,

 

the screaming piha on her head-board.

Was it lithium or mercury that poisoned her?

 

that dissolved the oil paintings of onça-pintada,

the face she made up so carefully each morning.

 

Now her mascara’s streaked, her paw shakes.

My mother in her spotted pyjamas,

 

vicious as a jaguar caught in a trap,

the tranquilliser dart wearing off.

 

My fierce mama, her teeth in a mug,

hydroelectric dams draped around her neck.

 

Pascale Petit