Pascale Petit: Two Poems

The Hummingbird Whisperer

Let the surgeon who opens my mother

be tender as a hummingbird whisperer.

Let him pull back the walls of her abdomen

and see uncut jewels under his knife.

Let him have a pet name for each part—

his hummers, oiseaux mouches,

his beija-flores, colibris, his almost

extinct hooded visorbearer.

Let him handle them with crystal instruments,

easing droppers down each throat

to check their stomach contents are rich

in micro insects and spider eggs,

the nectar of never-before-seen orchids.

Let him soothe them as their black eyes

turn to watch him. Let them be so calm he can

unwrap their dressings to measure their wings

and wipe blood from their feathers.

Let him clean each gorget and crest

so the colours shine with health.

Let my mother’s dryads and sylphs,

hermits and Incas, her sapphires,

her ruby-topaz moustiques,

practise flying again—forwards, backwards,

on the spot, hovering and hyperactive

to the last in their silk compartments.

Let their dissolvable straitjackets

drop off at the appointed time. Let

the man who closes my mother’s body

check that each flight feather is intact

and return her to the recovery room to land safely.

Pascale Petit

My Wolverine

When my mother says I was her kit

taken from her too early,

I think not of cats but a wolverine,

my devourer of snowfields, who,

when she can find no more prey,

eats herself, even the frozen bones.

I crawl down the black phone line

as if it’s an umbilicus

to the last refuge on our planet,

towards whatever back country

happens to be her territory today.

My nails remember to claw.

I lope up the icefall

she’s retreated to, that’s melting behind her

as she climbs her precipice, too drunk

on freedom to come down.

She shows me the den where words are born

fighting. I do not blame her.

I hold the receiver against my face

as if it’s her muzzle, her reek

of blizzard-breath. I embrace

the backward-barbed teeth that can

fell a moose and gnaw even its hooves.

Kit—she spits the word out

in a half-love half-snarl and I

am her glutton, scavenging on my yelp

when I was torn from her after birth,

and again now—not long before she dies.

Pascale Petit