Currency: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben
       

1.

What you don't want is for your mother to feel lonely
so you sit with her on the phone when she speaks Japanese

even though you don't understand. Honto ni? you say
when she pauses for breath, imitating the various cadences

of the phrase remembered from childhood when
she spoke with friends. Secretly, you used to think of it as

the language of birds. You match the inflections of her voice:
quiet and conspiratorial, surprised, outraged, scoffing: Honto ni?

Sometimes it works for a while, but always, as in English,
her tone becomes keening, aggrieved, and she turns on you.

2.

In fall, the house sparrows flash-mob and flock
in your backyard bushes and trees, splashing

like hopped-up lotto balls in the bright puddles
of rain glazing the asphalt in your alleyway.

They form a tiny horde with the same tyrannies,
the same totalitarianisms, as the year before.

They are ruthless: smashing eggs, murdering chicks,
in their fight to stake out nesting sites. They shriek

and keen and cheep: what your mother used to say
was the sound of pichu-ka pichu-ka bird singing.

3.

You can't know what you don't know when your mother
excoriates you over the phone in Japanese, but there are words

you recognize—baka, for example, or busu—spat at you
in the same contemptuous tone she uses to spit them at you

in English—stupid and ugly—shortly before she slams down
the receiver, yanks the phone cord from its socket. You think

of the linguistics of electricity, how currents can be translated
into watts, volts, amps, and ohms, how the currency of energy

is different in other countries. You think of the rain of sparks,
electrical fire, when plugs are jammed into the wrong sockets.

4.

Because the only thing you do for your mother that's ever
made her happy is to provide her with an infusion of cash,

because no amount of cash you give her will ever be enough,
because she doesn't actually want to spend the cash just

hoard it and hide it because then it will be all hers and not
yours, because when she can't find the cash she hides

she likes to accuse you of breaking into her room while
she's sleeping and snitching it, because you are, she tells you,

a complete useless, and because you just want her to be happy
you send her envelopes fat with stacks of fake currency.

5.

This used to be your favorite time of year: how the currents
of the river become chilly and more muscular, dappled

with yellow leaves that seem like bright fish bur aren't; the way
house sparrows raid the black currant bushes in quarrelsome

throngs then attach themselves to the upstairs window screens
with their tiny feet, plinking and strumming the steel mesh

like atonal guitars, while the cats slowly lose their minds inside;
how night's dark spill of hair is silvered by cool threads

of wind; the feeling of autumn like a circuit of electricity,
a golden tourniquet tightening around summer's end.

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Copyright © 2022 Lee Ann Roripaugh All rights reserved
from Boulevard
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission