Along with other poems in my collection Caulbearer (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), the title poem is something I wrote during a period of long, anticipatory grieving before my mother passed away in our home city in the Philippines, in September 2023. The last time I saw her in person was for a brief eleven days in January 2020, before the world began to shut down from the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the many things I had to accomplish during that visit was the legal paperwork to designate an older cousin as my attorney-in-fact, to help me carry out whatever we might need to do to ensure my mother’s care and safety. Before that, I’d gone for three weeks in the summer of 2015, accompanied by my youngest daughter—my mother was 82 then, but spry and fiercely independent as always. She, who’d sewn all our clothes on her Singer sewing machine when I was growing up, still liked to take public transportation into the city, walking around in colorful outfits and a signature hat on her head, greeting friends and new acquaintances alike with effervescence. Two days before our departure, she came to our hotel room bearing gifts: a vivid pink dragon fruit which she proceeded to slice open, urging us to eat right away; and two pairs of shoes she’d bought for me to bring back to Virginia—deep magenta ballet flats adorned with anemone-like puffs, and high-top sneakers edged with frilly petals of gold lace. She exclaimed, “You can wear these out even when you do your groceries!”
During my 2020 visit, we spirited her out of her home both for a medical assessment, and to involve her in discussions of what we proposed to do to take her out of a living situation that was increasingly dangerous to her continued well-being. I was profoundly shocked and sad at how frail and different she had become. Though she was still sharp and smiling, something had noticeably gone out of her spirit. Her head of once-dark, wavy hair (which she’d also liked to flamboyantly streak with henna) was completely white. She could barely walk, and now only in a shuffle; and her hands kept clutching at the top of her blouse. Apparently, she’d gotten into the habit of hiding a slice of bread under her camisole; it turned out that relatives she was living with, whom she’d sheltered rent-free for decades, were basically starving her. After we’d settled her into a care home away from the people who were harming her, I would receive regular updates via text and email. She looked less frightened, even happier. There were video clips of her among other elders in wheelchairs out sunning in the garden, singing bars of her favorite songs in a still-clear soprano. Her hands fluttered like moth wings conducting an invisible orchestra as the nurses clapped. But the years had taken their toll; her memory was fading, her immune system weakening. She passed away in the hospital where she’d been confined from a respiratory infection, after spending a little over three years in the care home.
*
Around my neighborhood in this coastal city of Eastern Virginia, along the cultivated median of 43rd street and other edges of the university where I teach—from around April to early August, I see the perennial shrub yucca putting forth clusters of bell-shaped white flowers, soft-cheeked amid spikes of green. Mostly from my own curiosity, I read up on this plant which is part of a large family of other yucca plants including Yucca elata (Soaptree yucca), Yucca treculeana (Spanish Bayonet or Don Quixote’s Lance), Yucca glauca (Beargrass), Yucca filamentosa (Adam’s Needle, Golden Sword, or Ghost Lily), Yucca brevifolia (Joshua Tree). When I’ve mentioned yucca to others, their first reference seems to be the Yucca brevifolia—either because they’ve been to Joshua Tree National Park in southern California (which embraces parts of both the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts) or have heard of the Joshua Tree Music Festival. In either case, the iconic image that comes to mind is that of the Joshua Tree towering up to thirty feet against glowing desert skies. But the one that grows in these parts by the sea is Yucca filamentosa—more modest in height by comparison, with flowers on spikes reaching up to eight feet; a graceful ornament to cultivated gardens as well as on the roadside. As night descends on summer evenings, they are rows of lit tapers.
What is common to all varieties of yucca, however, is their unique symbiotic relationship with the yucca moth—the only pollinator of the yucca plant. The National Wildlife Federation describes the yucca moth as a “specialist species, meaning they do one thing and do it well.” The female yucca moth deposits pollen from a yucca flower on the stigma in another yucca flower cup, fertilizing it. At the same time, she lays her eggs in the ovaries of the flower; when they hatch, the larvae are assured of the only food they can eat.
I first started thinking about what eventually went into my poem “Caulbearer” sometime in late 2019, partly in response to Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo’s 1948 work “Alegoría del invierno (Allegory of Winter).” The things I name in the first two lines—
“Pheasant and nuthatch, five-petaled flower,
emerald feather suspended in veils—”
are direct references to the painting. There are five things enclosed in gauzy nets, each hanging between the spikes of some kind of desert plant. They are the only things blushed with color in a drab and dusty dreamscape. At the same time that I wondered when they would break free, I also wondered how they might survive in such an arid world. I hoped that when they did emerge, they would not accidentally impale themselves on those barbs.
In some cultures, including in the Philippines, a child born with part or all of the amniyós (amniotic sheath) over its head or body is considered lucky. Even as the midwife or doctor works to quickly free the child from it so as not to endanger its breathing, the amniyós is considered to have talismanic properties. It is believed that the child, this caulbearer, is marked with a kind of otherworldly protection; some say, even second sight—because for no matter how short a time, it knew what it’s like to inhabit a space in its transit from one world to another. For me, what we bring into poems as well as the poem itself lives in this same kind of liminal territory. It’s as if in the poem we are allowed a veiled glimpse of visions and insights from feeling and remembrance, mingled with the facts of our real and imagined lives and circumstances.
“…we don’t know how long the world can hold
such specimens of tenderness, how far
the glacial drifts can ferry such tombs,
immaculate, before they themselves turn
into ghosts—Everything writhes before the dream
discards what it calculates for reduction:
and yet the yucca moth delivers its eggs
inside the flower, even as leaves sharpen
their bayonet-points.”
As an immigrant and a writer in the diaspora, despite the length of time I’ve lived in the U.S. and as a naturalized citizen, I’m still conscious of the feeling of being neither here nor there. There is a fantasy of irrecoverable return, and here is the place to which I’ve carried the ghosts of my own (and perhaps my community’s) nostalgia. Between these two states of being is a veil perishable as a panicle of yucca flowers, sheer as the wings of a yucca moth whose continued existence in an often brutal world depends on mutuality. But it is also a space which I want to imbue with as much tenderness as I can.
