In Memoriam

Every mother dies a great death
to no one but themselves. How
ever green the mortician’s spread

of formulas and preserves, the faint
ring of the mother spreads: waves
in the brain a glossary of great daily

losses: louder, louder her ring fades
if only at last the living map’s own
disaster breathes waves into dead

wave. Silence. The mother is always
her own victory. Spirit who crosses
flesh taking turns in steps hard

around a bright living home: shadow
of her nothing made flesh: child of
loss watching corpse and jasmines

crown to stink and pollen in one
final yellow rush. Daniel, we share
in death, our mothers—we who

share no other bond, I am sorry.
You, who drag yours in flesh-ton
weights to syllables full-form—ah—

how waves reach living pink folds I
cannot imagine. My own I string
to my waist. A wisp of spirit dragged

like a balloon buoying her green will
as if I wish her planted in my garden.
Speak. How I would exchange not

who bore and left us, but by some
great magic, gift you a new string
to tie your mother’s spirit to her lush

syllables strung from her own bright
mouth to leave her her own ghost
life. May you live without shadows

walking in your own bright-blight
home. May I make flesh my mother’s
spirit and plant her in a garden I mend

so I may tend what I fail to deliver.
May you drive South without murder
or ghost. May the fool make good
journey, his. Farewell, new friend.

Jimin Seo is the author of OSSIA and a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at William & Mary. His recent projects include Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London and a site activation for salazar|sequero|medina’s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

This poem was selected by September poetry curator Leslie McIntosh, who writes: “Attentive readers will notice a theme emerging. The poems that I chose also chose each other. Mothers and mothering, memories and their remembrance—these were the most compelling conversations I found myself eavesdropping as I moved from corner to corner of the transom I solicited. Seo’s ‘in Memoriam’ had a baroque tongue, the kind I could feel in my own mouth. The poem works, and loves, through echoes—words and ideas are repeated and shifted to build tensions that ripple between their appearance and reappearance. The results are larger tonal structures across the tercets and quatrain that comprise the poem’s verdant surface. What better garden for lost mothers to be their ‘own victory’? What better form for my own ‘bright mouth’ to bloom from itinerant to attendant?”

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