At the end of it
my mother grew light.
Seemed hollow the way
bird bones are hollow.
Mom could sit forever
at the breakfast table to finger
her silver rosary strung with blue
glass beads that had small pocks
As some flower seeds are almost
perfect spheres but fall short
have pocks, flaws. Mom said
her quiet Hail Mary’s decade after decade
Until she’d finally doze off somewhere between
“The fruit of thy womb” and “the hour of our death.”
The ground is our enduring hope. First came
months of a relentless scorching that lasted
beyond any reckoning we have ever known.
The earth grew angry, strangled many things.
Then came a time when geese arrived back
in our skies and on the shyly lapping
shores of our lakes. In black night geese’s blasts
shake stars. Between those two times, earth’s orbit
Tilted us away from the sun. The fibers of satsuma
spiders in vibrating webs, dew as it drenches fields
even sheets of paper on desks feel this
the removal of sun’s intensity. Feel
That decrease lift in every cell. Such loss is gain
Held in quiet and in speech upon our tongues.
Inside a single diamond of rain
heaven might rest.
You can be doing anything
sliding towels into a cabinet
Turning the page on
an afternoon nap
and tell in your bones
the exact second
When rain, any rain
starts, when it stops.
Aren’t deer, raccoons
and trees like that also.
Absolutely
Married to air.
Boxes teeter on edges,
crammed full of younger selves,
formative but now unrecognisable,
faces in thickened mist.
Dancing shoes are packed:
laying head to toe,
mimicking children
in large Victorian families,
nestled for warmth in bed,
coping with lack of space.
As I tape and label boxes,
I wonder which will stay closed,
concealing its underbelly forever,
refusing to give up its wares
for prouder, newer houses.
Sometimes, I wish to crawl in,
tape myself up
with kitchen crockery,
burrowing to forgetfulness,
finding a singular space
where moving does not exist:
viewings, listings, sale boards, asking prices
are ghostly figments,
glittering to coal dust
in darkened cardboard corners.
But then I see her,
eyes dilating with what can be:
more space, wraparound gardens,
kitchen islands to dance around.
Quite suddenly,
cardboard cities
are no longer a place of refuge.
My thoughts climb back out,
placing my imagination
upon taller, wiser trees,
where it can see sunlit bands
of new possibilities.
We regroup, join forces,
as we search for new homes,
eager, now readied,
on the move.
I think of her now, how she loved gardens,
and the genuine grace of her soul
That word she used for the slate of human construction,
calling here and there to smallish birds
Black dahlias, illustrative envelopes of sound,
things no listening can hear
The Cana Lilly, the big flowers failed states
in the small corners we call we weeds,
Dove blue gods that let every sparrow
fall with parasols, from the opulence of their death,
Marigolds, young and disenfranchised, destitute,
payless wanderlusts, half the age of the sun,
Secret credulities of hybrids, upstart redacted notions,
of what a flower might say
Were it to salute the queen bee,
as its rump pollinates the whole,
On the day we have risen into missionary position,
forgetting the frugalities of war,
Speechless as a seed, rounded vowels bootstrapped
to the tigers, crouched in the undergreen,
Strong colours for the wireless calling,
the shyness haunting the internecine affair,
And in the ravine, singer of the olive tree,
orchards illuminated, a dais of waifish sea
Crawling the waves stoked by dawn,
limericks of dancing leprechauns and an unctuous breeze,
Couched behind words unspoken, in the back rooms
of ivory towers, unloved and unheard.
These cricket type things that only live twenty-four hours
having been buried half a century beneath ground.
Moon and stars hand lettered in love, rainbows in tandem dipping cheek to cheek
the last tango of torrential light husking the bee season, pollinating the night sky.
And the halos of ice crystals bending the fletcher`s one good eye
the shaking palsy of white dwarfs, the twinkling true sentience, asterisks of unending light.
Bluffing shadows in the riddle of a rogue sun, a painful, last cheerful hour wringing its hands,
the face of the invisible unveiled, the dark lantern illuminating only itself.
And here in the helix of one cell, in the cocktail of Hemlock and honest Athenian wine,
the Greek phlox that grimaces, in the slaughterhouse of rain.
Ancient quarrels, witch-hunted by a menacing glance
banishing the quixotic fables of both poets and gods alike.
Opaque birds, flying through the slat of the kitchen door, telling tales out of school
space and plastic time, death chasing the plume of its chrysalis.
What shackles the phantom limb of utter squalor, the music box of rage
the limitless self-pity of those for whom no act or word is flesh enough to be real.
In the pleated rubble, a ribbon of days, fossils of lunar moss,
washed out in the scrimmage of its own memory, the rusted animal steeled in the grind.
The musk of twilight, in the dusking bazaar, of the labyrinthine Malthusian heart
the scent of turmeric, henna and sage, tossing a coin, wishing upon nothing at all.
And even when I fall into the jagged corners of that uneven tumble
the crimped steel lags on, filled with white fury, scuttles into the unpeeled onionskin night.