A wound. Still cutting and cutting still. Green as long as I can see. Emerald on a straightaway. Emerald-colored tin foil. Crinkling under the white sun. A wound sliced deep and bleeding green. Green, how I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches.
A friend once told me that life could be divided into two phases: one before reading Romance Sonambulo and one after. Three years out of practice, I tried to translate it. I failed after the third verde. The word stretched across the front of my lips, taut like a rubber band pulled against my teeth. Somehow even that verde was unstable, shifting in meaning as it lolled through the poem.
***
Family has always also seemed to me a vague word. I am a daughter. I am not a sister, may never be an aunt or a mother. It was not just a family that drowned along the Garonne in 2018. A couple drowned. A mother, a daughter, a son, and a father. Another daughter drowned. These things are the same and they are not. They move in verde, changing with each translation.
Because I analyzed the texts. The rattling sound disrupts Plath’s conflation between “womb” and “moon.” The iconicity of “rattles” creates a rolling voiceless alveolar stop that unsettles the assonance achieved by the interposition of “womb” and “moon.” Motherhood became sonic. I read somewhere that you should pitch your voice up when you talk to your child in the womb, that everything sounds lower from inside a sheath of your own pith and spongy flesh. I wrote it down, as if the possibility of recovering it a decade later might somehow answer all of my questions.
A few months later, it unraveled. I found myself in a country thousands of miles from my home, my only company strangers and near-strangers. One told me, don’t worry, you don’t have to play with my kids. Perfect, I didn’t want to, and I smothered the thought as quickly as it arose. An exit sign, rose red and blinking in my face. I pretended I didn’t want it, but really, I just didn’t want to want it, wanted to pretend that she said it for another person, so unlike me, who lacked that maternal instinct I so obviously possessed.
But when the time came, I took her words as gospel. When I sat in the pizzeria next to her, talking about grown-up things like cruise ships and religion, I would wince at the sound of a mommy that would pull her gaze. But I would smile big at her daughter when she took a heart-shaped smiley face sticker and planted it square in my palm. The wince was involuntary. The smile was not. Her kids were beautiful and she was beautiful and her husband was beautiful, the restaurant, the pizzas, the view of town from the window were all beautiful. But it did not feel natural. I failed the test. I head for the exit sign.
***
My mother told me once that when she was younger, her friend’s sister got pushed off the platform in front of a subway train. She used to tell me this to scare me out of wanting to go from Staten Island into Manhattan with friends when I was younger. I fucking hate the city she would tell me. It’s a cesspool. Every single time: fucking, then cesspool, then dead sister, like clockwork. Like the undiverted path of a river. Fucking at the source and a dead sister of a mouth.
Four years after the green wound took the family in France, Michelle Go died on the tracks in New York. Michelle was also a daughter. Michelle is the name of my mother, spelled the same way, with the double l. Died on the tracks. It’s strange how easy that is to say, how the sentence can be manipulated to avoid mentioning both the name of her attacker and the train itself. As if it was the subway track, that bitter gash, was responsible. When I ride the L into Bushwick, I sometimes remember to think of her. How many times would she wait for you, / Cool face, black hair. / on this green balcony!
There is nothing in this world more worth fearing than death, and yet. Yet a train barrels down its track, a boat sets itself on course down the Garonne. Such is the rush: unfettered, relentless, and forward. If I do have a daughter, I would want her to live forever. Or at least I would want it to feel something like forever. Forever in the post-Romance Sonambulo phase, until she too says My friend, I want to die / decently in my bed. / Of iron, if that’s possible, / with blankets of fine chambray.
