Landscape at the Third Stage of Grief

Abstract

Landscape at the Third Stage of Grief Alexandra Lytton Regalado Click for larger view View full resolution I This year my knees are having a hard kneel. This candle's firehas two hard eyes. The tree outside my window is twohard branches. My ankles cross at their hardest. Mornings crack open a blade. Words stagger, snagon the hem of curtains. The sprinklers always turn onwhen I want to lay on the lawn. The lawn has a bad burn. Our dog knows to lay out in the sun for twenty minutes.Our bones are depleted and hungry for sun. But the sunhas moved slant. The rains, too early. Flowers will fall as buds. My mother will never see this tree in bloom. It has been a hard yearfor a daughter. I am now the matriarch. It's a hard year for matriarchs.There is no April in these bones. There is a craving for salt, new imagery. It's all about leaves, cut leaves, dry leaves. No moretalk of things that grow. Perhaps, consider the roots,the ground they push against. It's been a hard year for mothers. Why does it surprise us when things are hard? Death leaves usuntethered. What grows without roots? What is the thing my mothersaid in the unlit room, sitting at the foot of my bed, when I could smell her perfume, and her deep voice and I sat up and asked,Are you there, and woke up? I could smell sandalwood and seeher knobbed hands. Now, she looks at me from a distance. Is she now birdsong, is she the knot in my stomach, the thingI search for as I enter every room. It's been a hard yearfor me. There are no metaphors in that statement. No twists or ribbons of glitter trails, just the stripped, plain dirt of it.The ripped-out root, the hole in the ground. The things thatno longer bloom. The water I continue to pour into the ground. [End Page 10] II Birds throw out their song and do not carethat the grass is scorched, and they tease out insectsfrom the blades or shift midflight to catch them in the air. I am the one that is hard. I am the one that is chippingaway. I am the stone that meets the spade. I am the onethat tumbles and turns her back. I am the pumice to leave everything smooth. Rain over me. Slide over me. I want it allto pass. I am brown and dry, the mountainside crying its alarmof cicadas. The tree made better because it adapts, the tree with a fallen branch, torn by wind. It's been a hardyear for all of us. And we are two stones clicking together.We will never be in stasis. I dig and dig and my hands elbow-deep and the rocks never end, this ground not aptfor plowing; plants move around stones and I amthe stone and the root that wraps around the stone. [End Page 11] Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma