Yesterday I buried my mother. Two mothers. Maybe three, or four. I have had many mothers in the small hours of this modest and shrinking life. All my mothers are tassels of foam threading mighty surf. All my mothers are exiled and liberated to a single body-host and fugitive core. The passions of men are septic, and in need of drainage. And not just any drainage: mother-drainage. Mothers swallow cesspools and geyser them upward and outward with religious fury. Mother-tongues perform rites on multiple levels. The stars wink, gratefully. Mirages rage fruitfully, and I say this because here I am, burying my mother again, for the first and always time, there is no end to these burials, no cessation to the amount of mothers becoming funeral batter (the heat of the earth causing them to rise, to rise) … In truth, or in reality—choose your semantical poison—I have buried none of my mothers, not a single one, but I have rehearsed these burials in the cradle of story, I have made myself minister and undertaker, reciting the canticle (while imagining dirt engraving its signature under my nails): I buried my mother yesterday. If I were to start again, and here I start again, I might say—Yesterday I buried my mother. And she buried me. It was a mutual agreement, a tacit bond.

   There’s something about burying the mother who buries you that engenders hallucinogenic closeness. My mother and I become vivid and clear, near and dear to each other in our correspondent deaths, in our shared burial plots.