Inmost

Abstract

Inmost Jessica Fisher (bio) And then we were in the privacy of intimacy: from the Latin, inmost. With the birth of the inmost. Where we lay. Or sat, hunched in the croup tent, the kettle boiling. Hearsay, though inadmissable in the United States. Because memory is a latecomer; and because it dismembers, misremembers. Though never "cow-heavy and floral." Nor "red and purple flowers on a black ground." An embroidered blouse, a bad perm. Or, sometime before, a photograph shows her squinting in the patch of sun, the shadow-wedge falling behind her, and then the shadows of trees. She can't, it seems, quite tell where to put her hands; her wrists crook in toward phantom pockets. A girlish figure. In the shadow, she seems handled. Someone could tell the time of day from its length. The year from the girls there, standing between her and the photographer. Then "many bright colours; many distinct sounds." Poppies, pansies, snapdragons, strawberries. We sat in the patch, looking for red. A woman who eased herself into the pool. Who had a song for each element. Eventually, if the mother's maiden name has fallen out of use, it becomes the answer to the secret question. The daughter's name, a password that husband and wife share. If their intimacy fails, she becomes a kind of currency, is traded. Not for goods, but seasonally. The photographs of before are a kind of contraband. Seven years a tithe. With her gone, I dismembered the songs, tetra coo coo coo sang by the ailing dove. Or her voice shook itself free of its body, rode the wires. I became interested in transport. How to be in [End Page 291] the same place at the same time. We read together, apart. The page a Ganzfeld. And made a home of the mind. Because she was missing, I found her everywhere. Or "motherhood is the fantasy . . . of a lost territory." A mise en abîme. And the mother a mirror. Russian dolls in a Chinese box. And then the smallest doll opened. She was there to hear the first cry. "One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain: the child represents it . . . Obviously you may close your eyes, cover up your ears, teach courses, run errands, tidy up the house, think about objects, subjects." But when the inmost moves out, the body hollows— an echo chamber. Ours is a scripted love. We stick to it. But wordless, the shshsh kept up long after the child's asleep. Whose lulling. [End Page 292] Jessica Fisher Jessica Fisher won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize for her book Frail-Craft (Yale University Press, 2007) and is coeditor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street Anthology. She lives in Oakland with her husband and daughter and is a postdoctoral fellow in poetry at the University of California, Berkeley. Copyright © 2009 Jessica Fisher