Natasha Trethewey - Calling lyrics

Calling Mexico, 1969 Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? I want to say it begins like this: the trip a pilgrimage, my mother kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin, enthralled - light streaming in a window, the sun at her back, holy water in a bowl she must have touched. What's left is palimpsest - one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it. How else to explain what remains? The sound of water in a basin I know is white, the sun behind her, light streaming in, her face- as if she were already dead - blurred as it will become. I want to imagine her before the altar, rising to meet us, my father lifting me toward her outstretched arms. What else to make of the minds slick confabulations? What comes back is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface, light filtered through water closing over my head, my mother - her body between me and the high sun, a corona of light around her face. Why not call it a vision? What I know is this: i was drowning and saw a dark Madonna; someone pulled me through the water's bright ceiling and I rose, initiate, from one life into another.