This poem is part of my collection exploring psychological disorders, as well as part of my second-place winning selection for the 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize.
Fear of Water
Forty years ago
my grandmother’s husband
hurdled himself into the narrow
neck of the San Francisco Bay.
His papers urging him to return to war sailed
from his hand
on the big black water
pushed by his tired, junglesteam breath.
No one talks about this,
or my drowned cousin.
My grandmother told me never to
raft down the Russian River
that was how your cousin died.
The crumpled rubber
on the shore; white
water slobbering a name
to thorn bushes.
My sister and I agitated:
What secret was bred in Auntie’s womb?
Was her only daughter’s plus size
forty centimeter
newborn head
the only reason
no one talks about her birth?
Is the weeping weighty straining
and squeezing of life too much for us?
Or was there a second secret,
was there another cousin
from ages back
who gave in to rainwater
and made our latest cousin’s birth a miracle
of Auntie’s ameliorated spirit?
until our mother, my grandmother’s
eldest daughter
assured we’d never had
any cousin but one,
whose singular head was grown in utero
and exited in the usual fashion.
My grandmother told me never to
hold pins between your lips
when stitching, though
I often plucked them from her mouth
like a bird pulling twigs from a dam.
My grandmother told me always to
wipe your machine
with oil.
Water
will leave its mark.
We suffer
from a fear:
Hydrophobia or
Aquaphobia
which mixes the Latin and the Greek
sloppily. A guttural clog, while
Hydrophobia
spins like a propeller.
But Hydrophobia: specifically and only
a symptom of later-stage Rabies
Hydrophobia, tidily
formed and spoken,
also clogs
the throat with foam.
We had buckwheat cakes and
sausages the morning
my grandmother’s two
daughters sang and cried for her,
with nothing to wash them down.
