Cataclysm Baby

Svara, Sveta, Sylvana

See now our subterranean daughters, our dark-eyed beauties so impossible to keep in their wicker cribs, to keep inside our rude-made gravedigger’s hut, perched at the rent edge of this barren plot.

See them squirm free of their cribs, their new and segmented bodies falling to the packed-dirt floor, down and out of this home I built for them and their mother.

See me with shovel and mattock, tearing up the flooring, uncovering tunnels, chambers, new and deeper rooms.

See them tangled in each other’s sleeping bodies, keeping each other warm in the dampness of the earth, their spade-thumbs sucked and suckled in the absence of us, their parents.

See what watch I keep, what eyes I fix on their cribs, but see also how it is never enough, how all day there are piles of the plagued to heap into graves, and then all night there is their sick mother, bedridden, her vulgar pains leaving her no chance of sleep.

See me feed their mother through her stomach tube. See me soak her sore skin. See her tears at the rub of the sponge, the touch of the soap.

See our daughters taking advantage of my absence to again escape the confines of their cribs.

See me waking to their three tiny gowns beside three tiny holes, three petite piles of spent dirt, then to their wailing mother in the next room.

See me digging up the floor to find their burrows empty.

See me on my knees, reaching into the dirt, feeling their new passages, exit vectors from the confines of our home, our yard: Three tunnels for three baby girls, each in a direction of its own.

See my wife, their mother, my fading light. See me cutting her screaming hair while she cries for her children to return.

See also what I do not do: See me not covering the burrows, not filling in the caved pit of our kitchen floor, the room where I fed our daughters porridge after prying free the grubs and beetles they held stubborn in their hands and mouths.

See the day my wife loses her last voice, the day she sends me from the room with weak flurries of spotted hands, because if she cannot have her daughters she does not want me instead.

See how I crawl down into the dirt, into the sunken ruins of our home. See me whisper into the center of the earth, see me beg them to come back, to visit their mother once more before she is gone.

See the day they emerge together, clothed only in grave-dirt.

See how they’ve grown, how their toddling days have ended, how some new age is upon them.

See next their fists clenched around ginger and burdock, around echinacea, around liquorice and marshmallow.

See me gather them up onto my chest. See me carry all three at once in my arms. See me take them into our bedchamber, their hands stuffed with the medicine they traveled so far to find.

See until you cannot see anymore.

Listen: Their first words in turn, three broken intonations of cure and mother and save her, save her. What stories they tell then, of places they have gone, of the things they have seen! What hard hurt of my heart follows, what ungrantable wish shaping this trembling flesh, this poor gravedigger again made quaking father!

Listen: The sound of herbs hitting the floor is a whisper, then a word. Roots collapse, tubers tumble, and what sentence can follow? What good noise can I make for my daughters then, clinging reluctant to my body, this earth they no longer love?