Pascale Petit: Three Poems

Musician-Wren

My mother, who today is just

a coat hung on the line—

 

let me be a musician-wren

and nest in your pocket

 

to sing you these fluted notes

straight from the forest’s throat.

_______________________________

Mama Amazonica

1

 

Picture my mother as a baby, afloat

on a waterlily leaf,

 

a nametag round her wrist—

Victoria amazonica.

 

There are rapids ahead

the doctors call “mania”.

 

For now, all is quiet—

she’s on a deep sleep cure,

 

a sloth clings to the cecropia tree,

a jaguar sniffs the bank.

 

My mother on her green raft,

its web of ribs, its underside of spines.

 

I’ll sing her a lullaby,

tell her how her quilted crib

 

has been known to support

a carefully balanced adult.

 

My newborn mama

washed clean by the drugs,

 

a caiman basking beside her.

 

 

2

 

All around her the other patients snore

while her eyes open their mandorlas.

 

Now my mother is turning

into the flower,

 

she’s heating up. By nightfall

her bud opens its petals

 

to release

the heady scent of pineapple.

 

How the jungle storeys stir

in the breeze from the window behind her.

 

She hears the first roar

of the howler monkey,

 

then the harpy eagle’s swoop,

the crash through galleries of leaves,

 

the sudden snatch

then the silence in the troop.

 

 

3

 

Haloperidol,

phenobarbital—

 

they’ve tried them all

those witch doctors, and still

 

she leaps up in her green nightie

and fumbles to make tea,

 

slopping the cup over her bed

like the queen of rain.

 

See her change from nightclub singer

to giant bloom

 

in the glow of the nightlight—

 

a mezzo-soprano

under the red moon.

 

She’s drawing the night-flying scarabs

into the crucible of her mind.

 

Over and over they land

and burrow into her lace.

 

By dawn she closes her petals.

 

 

4

 

All the next day the beetles stay inside her,

the males mount the females,

 

their claws hooked round forewings.

 

There is pollen to feed on—

no need to leave their pension.

 

Night after night, my mother

replays this—how the white

 

lily of her youth

let that scarab of a man

 

scuttle into her floral chamber

before she could cry no.

 

She flushes a deep carmine,

too dirty to get up.

 

And her face releases them—

the petals of her cheeks spring open.

 

Black beetles crawl out, up the ward walls.

Pascale Petit

 

_____________________________

Macaw Mummy

Soon they will unwrap her.

Soon it will be over—

 

only five hundred

years to go.

 

What did he put in her drink?

Whatever it was has given her

 

a dream she can’t escape from,

however much she wills

 

the bandages to unwind,

her eyes to open,

 

however much she promises

never to cry again.

 

Her scarlet feathers

lie bravely under the ice

 

of his deep-frozen duvet.