Miriam's Mother

MIRIAM’S MOTHER She was a beautiful woman the color of coffee enlightened by cream Her multicultural mask gathered all the credentials, all the climbing essentials increasingly required for successful ascent through the rugged topography of the American Dream For seventeen years her purposeful stride, androgynous demeanor, her ambiguous ambition and intellectual poise sliced through our lives with irresistible force, not as a knife or a broad-axe or hatchet, but like a powerful wind, its invisible motion clearly revealed by the changing condition of objects nearby! And then she was gone! One day she returned, caressing a child, as if a serious dancer emerging from sand dunes perpetually shifting in some far distant desert where culture and custom are somehow defined by searing white light from the immaculate brightness of an indifferent star “This is Miriam!” she said, as a rising warm breeze discreetly maneuvered the metamorphosing sands of the oasis we shared “And I am that I am!” she said with her love, eternal, omnipresent, like the infinitive form of the verb “to be” that forbids conjugation in describing the essence of a transcendent deity in some ritual proceeding While continuing to speak, she never stopped swaying, and without premeditation she transformed herself into an external womb so that she and the baby were increasingly fluid, a curiously contained configuration of water rhythmically lapping an invisible shore, the baby asleep in the liquid milieu, helpless and safe as if she had never been born Emanuel Carter