A Brief History

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     for my mother

1977. My mother drives long backroads in a blue economy car

as my father in construction, black hair wet in a helmet

cautionary blue, sweats. Willed against, pulled,

I keep my mother’s image in my locks of pluvial earth; for years

crew cut, kept from its coiled shape the way sunsets were

from the freshwater lake as miles of duckweed took it over,

as I was kept from the vision of the city fading

through an airplane window in the final afternoon

in which I left my country, two years before the death of the dictator,

like the two years before the night of the war in the photograph

of my grandfather, in which he leans

through the opening shutters of his now destroyed childhood home,

side-swept hair sable-like, so dark some say it was the blue

of an ocean at midnight the summer my mother, umbilical cord

wrapped around her neck, was born choking blue turning rosy until she,

Elena, cried for the first time, fontanelle oxygen blue.