Forlorn. How could she have been otherwise?
Yet, I cannot say my mother was “without hope”
for she is Hope. She does not know whose hand
pried off the lid—the roof of her prison—
only to shut it before she could escape.
You might guess Pandora, believing Hesiod,
but in another version it was a “foolish man”
who opened the gift from the gods,
a jar not full of Hesiod’s “plagues and demons”
but of the finest Qualities.
They escaped into the world and disappeared—
all except Hope. We will never know
whose hand it was that pried and shut the lid,
for Mother tells me she saw only fingertips
silhouetted against stunning light.
She had never seen before, never been before—
not as a separate self. The Qualities had been
but scattered elements of themselves
dispersed in the All-in-All contained in that jar.
It was an All-in-All teeming with untried energy,
held in a fragile balance.
She had never known this before.
She had never had word-thoughts
before she coalesced into this unfamiliar form.
Words were coming to her only singly
and she hardly knew what they meant,
but she felt what they meant:
sifting, culling, shrinking, parting, becoming.
What was this boundary of skin … these fingers?
What was this face that she could not see,
but only feel with her fingers?
What were these wings that she could move
and that could move her?
This metamorphosis could not
have been happening to my mother alone.
But who, she wondered, were these others?
If, until the seal was broken,
the jar had contained only the finest Qualities—
empathy, compassion, tolerance, patience —
how could there have been such contentious kicking,
jabbing, buffeting of newfound legs, elbows, wings
at the rim of the jar?
But if she had been dispersed in a demonic brew,
why did one of these now embodied demons
pause to search her eyes,
press a kiss to her forehead
as if to borrow something before he escaped?
My mother knew nothing of her own myth,
only that the Qualities with which she
had been suspended were clearly disparate;
and now they were gone.
The forceful shutting of the jar chipped the rim
so that in rays of sunlight shining
through chinks large and small,
she could make out feathers wafting down to her
from wings nearly caught.
II. IT WAS NOT LIKE THAT
If ever you have imagined her story,
you may have pictured Hope
striving to escape the urn like the others—
perhaps only a hairsbreadth from freedom
when the lid shut.
It was not like that. She felt no urgency.
Little did she suspect the possibility of escape
would be lost so quickly.
But none of the Qualities could have known.
My mother Hope explains she was
taking in the changes; and of course, she would be
less inclined than most to expect the worst.
She has had ample ages of confinement to regre—
she would say ‘to revisit’ that day.
(Regret is such a wasteful emotion.)
For ages, she measured days as humans do,
in the perpetual revolution of light and darkness.
Her only light came from the movement
of rays through chinks in the earthenware rim.
Spotlights—now intense, now faint, now flickering—
glanced off the walls of her cell, day after day.
She was certain she would be freed.
But would her freedom come at the hands
of the one who released the others?
Or would one of the others return for her?
Whatever All they once constituted
could never be whole without her.
Perhaps that Quality who looked so intently
into her face would recognize her absence.
At first, her eyes were trained on the rim.
From time to time she flew there—
if those few strokes of her wings
could be called “flight.”
She hovered long at each cleft but could make out
only the changing sky and stars,
a glimpse of sun or moon.
As she grew accustomed to the patterns of light
over the interior of the urn,
she repeatedly predicted the instant
of her own release:
when this ray crosses that one;
when that oval of light flares bright;
when that spot fades to black.
On the floor of her cell, she paced the rough,
concentric grooves left by the potter’s fingers.
Hope’s feet grew sore, then calloused,
but it was difficult to stop.
The repetition calmed, even mesmerized her.
Mother desires neither food nor drink.
But every Quality must sleep.
Wrapping her wings about her, she gave in to it.
The