The gorgeous half-rhyme of “dims” and “wind” seems to secure the argument here: facts are fleeting, dimmed by intervening years and interpretations. How could the unearthing of a nearly century-old medical record possibly fill the hole a mother’s death must leave in her children’s, and her children’s children’s, lives?
Ironically, it is “superstition,” that points us toward an answer in Beaumont’s final “Letter from Limbo,” which closes the book. “You ask what glories we have access to,” she begins, and then details the view of “the firmament…like a colossal jewelry box” and the “heights of star-gazery” achieved by the residents of her imagined “Limbo”: it is “a form of rapture, one / in which no body need be left behind.” The image is timely for such a peculiarly immigrant nation as ours, one reliant upon the mythology of individualism: that we must look away from all of the bodies we have “left behind,” in other countries and other versions of history, if we are to move forward. But what if, like Anna K., we can’t? Is this a failure of the individual, whose story must now be tidied—“dying in childbirth” not “in an asylum”—to avoid bringing shame upon her family? Where is the shame in mourning a lost child or parent or home, and who gains when we deny it?
Again, Beaumont doesn’t hazard explanation; however, the freedom in these last images of bodies unfettered by time or judgment, a “billowing citizenry hung high amid / the heavens,” is perhaps the kindest and best reason for reviving the stories of Anna K. and her little blue granddaughter, figures so cruelly abandoned by life. “We’re so much more than clothed and fed,” Beaumont declares in her final line, releasing Anna K. and the blue baby from the confines of poverty, immigration, maternity, and that “christening gown” to spin away from the bleak physics of history and heredity toward “glories” hard won in the benevolent “limbo” these poems provide.