by Cy March

passing

to Cy Twombly’s “Beyond (A System for Passing)”

            i.

I wonder what Twombly thought he was drawing about. My dad’s shoulders and the yellow-leafed street. I am afraid I am running out of years to look like him. Maybe I never will. My mom stands beside my dad in the photo. I am told I look most like her. The sky strained, striated blue. I had never thought to look that way. She is thin and tan with long brown hair. I insist I have my dad’s hands and ears. Neither of them are quite looking at the camera. I am not in the photo. It is an image from before I was born. I am standing off to the side. I imagine us with gauze over our eyes. Moving towards a body to better look with. Our forms drawn out. We feel our way along the edge of the page.

            ii.

I think mean things about my mom. Little words get big. They are not that serious. I love her. I make up certain conversations. I tell her things about myself. When she visited that time, she called me Sophie. I do not always mind that name. She calls me Cy on the phone now. I am worried I have made myself mind my other name. I am older than when my parents first met. There is no photo of their meeting. They ate cake on my dad’s front stoop. I do not know her life. I do not know what falls into my lap. It is usually full. Talking to her feels impossible. I build these things up. We are always about to talk. What if I let myself? It is easier not. She tells me what she had for dinner. I care about these details. I allow for indifference. I do not want to get used to life.

            iii.

What is mine to subsume? I take notes. I look at Twombly’s drawings elliptically, to see how they make me think of me. This is my motion towards knowing. The sky and its double are gray. What in the line of my mom’s nose is mine? I am not meant to watch nor understand the mechanism; it reaches as I reach, towards what is not mine and what I try to make mine. In the poem, I make the photo up, though I know a part of it exists. A waxy, meager blue. I fill the drawing in. The mechanism grates against itself. I shore up the borders of my words. Oil and graphite. I write between what passes through me.