What if Emily Dickinson were a single mother
and I were her immaculately conceived daughter,
trying to understand her white dresses and recluse ways,
her poems about the snake, the ocean filling her shoe,
and Death like a gentleman in a carriage picking her up to ride?
What if Walt Whitman were my father, always singing
that song of himself in my left ear, his beard scratchy,
before he went out to chase after his lover-boys?
What if Queen Elizabeth I were my grandmother,
and she wouldn’t take lip from anyone, and insisted
that I grow up to be strong and courageous like her,
ready to cut my last words with a diamond
into a pane of glass, then escape my prison to map the world?
What if my memories of my great-grandfather, King Henry VIII,
made me sick enough to cry, but not sick enough to die,
as I turned the pages of the Book of Common Prayer?
What if my brothers and sisters, thousands of them,
were all Holocaust survivors? What if my nieces and nephews
were aborted, but I found their bodies in back-alley dumpsters
and prayed like Saint Margaret until they fell out
of the dragon, mutilated and deformed, but shining?
What if my aunts were dancers who occasionally
worked over-time as bar-girls in Thailand? What if my uncles
were rapists and thieves?
What if my mother died in her sleep, finally depressed
after years of manic visions and prophetic lies, only
to appear to me—sweet, beatific Emily!—caressing my face
in a dream and promising to protect me, finally, from
the father of American poetry?
I am a seed, hidden in a pinecone, falling
from a tree. When the fire burns through the forest,
my pinecone will split open, my seed burrow into the ground,
my roots go down, my trunk go up, my branches
spread wide, and my children flower in my arms.
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