For Mom

The New Stranger
by Sharon Olds (from Blood, Tin, Straw)

They would peer in the carriage and ask was your father
Chinese, your lustrous, curly-lidded,
slightly tilted eyes, your elegant
forehead. You were a stranger to me—
I thought I would know you, but I had to get to know you—
I know your bowl brow, and serious
eyes, but sometimes you were alien to me
as a foetus, the large-brained head, the brain
forming its ancient folded flower
like a vegetable, you could not talk,
you looked at me as if from far
away, Mars, the newt, I did not
know you, I had never known a newborn, you
had to arrive into the arms of an amateur.
No one has known my ignorance so well, so
smelled my fear, there, with the fresh
abundant milk. And from no one have I learned
as I learned from you, you brought me forward
from brine and kelp and alkali
through mitosis, meiosis, zygote, delicate
blastocoele, with your eyes I swam up
from deep in your face, with your lips I opened,
with your tongue I formed your name, with the stub of your
hand I budded, with your baby-fat
I put on cells, with your brown, swirling
crown I crowned, with your life I came forth,
and a moment later, rose-blue, you opened
the new package of your breath. I looked
up, and saw you. Hard to tell,
in those first moments on the delivery table,
gore, and cord, and packet of gore,
who has hooked whom—you caught me
into the human. I learned to sit still while you
hauled that whale of milk tail-first down
out of me—split, fiery
flukes of your first sips—I learned to be
nuzzled as they might cuddle an autistic child. I learned to croon to you,
to cry and moan, and all this time
you were getting your first looks at the earth, it was
you, and I did not know you, I was not
there to greet you, I didn’t exist
until you smiled at me, and in your
brilliant loam-colored iris I saw,
tiny as an embryo,
your mother smile.