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long before I was born there was a woman ascending a mountain. 

it was in hawaii, and unseasonably very cold. this woman had a baby, and knowing the wind chill would be too much for his newborn skin, she wrapped him tightly in summer blankets and mounted him on her back.

to say I have sat and at length imagined the look on her face would be a lie. to say that I can approach the quiver of her lips, the trembling of her bones, the desperate clawing of her fingers would be a lie. so instead I undress my ghost, lay her out in a cove just far enough away so that I can barely see her with my eyes glazed over. so I can only feel her body with movements in my own, a kind of proprioceptive knowing. so that I can only examine her grief through the lens of my own self image. because without the veil of time our bodies are one. because that’s what one must do with ghosts.

and if you’re waiting for me to announce that she was my mother, she wasn’t.

I’m not sure who this woman was, or if this was Japan or Hawaii, or if she had my cheeks or not, or if her skin was creamy yellow like the moon shining over her, or if her skin was ghost white. or if she was my mother hiking Malibu cliffs as it was getting too dark to see the trail, or my great grandmother, freshly immigrated and freshly un-pregnant, alone on a mountain except for her baby, for the first time. 

I only know that there was forward motion, a propelling of she up the mountain with him clinging behind her.

is english her second language? is this baby her first? it must be. the baby is always referred to as a boy. the first boy. and she is always referred to as baban, the Japanese-Hawaiian hybrid word for grandmother. I don’t even know what language she speaks. should I try to ask the question in my shaky Japanese? should I try to ask the question at all?

to be in that question before the answer arrives. is that a feeling one can even express to another? up there, cold, shivering on the mountain? I don’t need that question answered. 

I move to the other side of the room again. hold up my hand and squint to obscure her upper half. my ankles brushing fields and fields of sugar cane. how did you endure that walk back down? what plants did your ankles brush as you made your way? what leaves did your tears settle onto, forming perfect crystal orbs? could you see the moon as you tore through the brush? who held you? who warmed your body despite your desire to be cold? what images will never escape their tether to that evening? 

I don’t need that question answered. I sit nearby with my bundle of words: she, mother, mountain, time, passage. they quiver sharply in the spaces of overlap. as I reach for the distant rivers of your mouth.

canaries

waking life now huddles in the timespace between bursts of electricity pinging off of the local cell tower. before my eyelids again assume stillness beneath tin foil each organ clasps onto itself. veins and arteries easily re-plugging like chords. a memory unwraps beneath layers of synthetic fabric: Linda clutching the family landline with the laughter in her teeth. Yellow kitchens of America. the coalescent waves: yellow laughter, America’s teeth. somewhere between dreams I hear the ping of a dial tone submerged by water. in most versions of the recollection Linda emerges blind from a metal house and the villagers wander the Arizona desert searching for pieces of my silvery body. in euphoric recline, a single vertebrae beneath 200 metric tons of sand.