The Matrilineal Line

In my meanness I hear the mother of my mother and her mother
before her, the cold cellars and flat pillows of their hearts. The single current
of anger that ran through their voices, each daughter forever through time
believing herself a burden. How else to be if you were a girl for just one day,
lifted your skirt in the river and felt against your legs the power you’d never be given
to leave. Babies would soon come, pulled one after another from their little pits
of crying, and a husband’s wet trousers scoured on river rock hefted perpetually
onto lines. And what else to block out the sun but your own raw hands? They had
daughters to have someone, my mother and her mother and her mother
before her. They wanted more than river, to sit alone for a minute and imagine
the ocean, something they’d heard of once, its salt like in a pot of potatoes, its swirl
of foam. That in imagining they might be carried away—from the entrails of rabbit
cast into fire, a husband that rose in the dark and in the dark fell into them—but someone
once said, whatever took their bodies, even in their minds, was a sin. Their desire
to imagine is what brought them to me, and I, given the privilege, cannot but grind
my own bones into a paste for the blooming wound of the next generation. The idiopathic
condition of my spine, its deterioration, isn’t it a family portrait? A matrilineal line?