Because when you tried to write the poem, it wasn’t the soundless sky, or the sun or the milk souring on
the sill that came first. It was your mother, holding you, necklace threaded through your
ugly seam of lips; and you, for the first time, tasting gold.

And don’t say gold doesn’t have a taste—it rusts, tamarind and sweats your salt; it’s unpaid
and unloved, buckling in the half-light, praying the baby alive while it blooms in a
mire of its own blood; it’s gapped teeth, so yellow it’s gold.

So yellow it’s orchard and daffodil and yolk bursting over a bowl of rice. Here, every grain you eat
is another she won’t, chewing the lamplight instead, until it limns her stomach a full lantern.
You’ve had your fill. You don’t even know that kind of gold.

The kind, Midas touching all our poor into plenty. Kind she vomits down the drain after
scrubbing the sink for hours, while you run dumbstruck through sidewalk
sprinklers; the light swirling in her vertigo-straddled iris—stains its rim gold.

Because she left her country, another son, another knot, undoing inside. Sold everything but that necklace
for plane money; and as she took off, and looked outside, even the dawn, donning a sudden silk
of bomb smoke, looked, yes, like gold.

Because she quit her job for you. Because her husband kept her money in his wallet. Because she
          asked him to buy her
a new necklace—her old one, chipping away; its monochrome
mosaic felled to the floor, its tiny flowers kissing your foot forever gold—

and your father said no, for the mortgage. Because you found her crying in her room, clutching
that necklace like a rosary, saying, I just wanted to look pretty. And because you are young,
you twist foil squares of chocolate wrappers into a ring and think it’s enough—press the gold

to her collar until she smiles. Because later at the party, the women whisper and laugh at the
          mud-bright murk fogging your mother’s neck. And you, fastened to her
clot-knuckled lung, say nothing—her good dress swept over your skull and the image
          pulsing there: ungrateful son. She always said your poems are easy to write: a dab of
blood here, a tooth there, a scab of smoke pluming at the line’s relentless
          edge. All this and you didn’t even write the poem for years; until now, threading
your name through the broken couplet like a threat: Janiru, meaning Son to the Nation. Or was it
          Sun? You never checked. This lonely inheritance
she gave you and little else. And though everyone you’ve met has
          mispronounced your name, your name is wrong in every mouth except her’s,
and it’s Winter and you haven’t seen the sun for weeks, you like the latter meaning better.
          Janiru—say it with your whole mouth. Watch the name, its light, paint your
lips, an ineffable gold.