his lip. Much later,
I read about a girl who saw her father
kill himself and then could not forgive
the amaryllis on the table, the giving up,
and oh, like that, the life wasted from him.
And if I could plow through earth
and touch my father, call back his spirit
and his flesh, I would tell him this,
then press my thumbs against his air
and kill him at my leisure.
SECOND SIGHT
I
Let the spirits gather here
in my mother’s eye. Let some
moonstruck apparition walk her
into the eternal. Three days
the dogs will bark at our door.
And the old women sing,
their voices smooth as ruby
elixir, their tobacco skins soft
as clay. Let her sickness depart.
Let morphine days vaporize
like breath in winter. Let the preacher
say the end. Tell him pour the wine,
the blood. Let her earthly dreams
be finished. Come, gather
beneath the swollen moon and touch
this life, fragile and resilient as skin.
II
My mother swears
that death walked in her room
last night, smiled at her and shook
her foot. But I bear witness
only to the scream that shook the house
and each day’s obituary
of sudden causes.
III
The lamp shines
on her distended face. I listen
for each breath that rattles,
spirit in a sack. Esprit, aspire, expire.
Expiration date unknown. She has come
to this. The old ways will not come to me.
My palms turn outward and prayers fall through
my open hands. Old women sing.
I hiss at the moon and pray for sight:
Wondrous and mystic light,
embrace my soul,
inflame my vacant eye.
THE DAY AFTER HER MOTHER DIED
She cannot wash the dish.
Even the bowl is too full of an egg yellow
she and her mother wore to a recital
in the park. If she looks closely
she can see lace forming
in the suds. Some thing, small and hard,
rises in her chest. She imagines
she can take a knife and with one stroke
divide herself.
“No such luck,” her mother would have said.
Instead, she settles for immobility,
and there she stands, her gown soaked
with dishwater, the bowl still
in her hand. Visitors come.
“Like clockwork,” her mother would have said.
Their hands are always full—
money, casseroles, prayers.
“We are sorry for your loss,” they say,
as if they cannot guess she is sorry too.
Between the visits, she waits
and waits for whatever comes next.
“A watched pot never boils,” her mother would have said.
Will someone, you perhaps,
step out of the shadows of this house,
seize this girl, and fold her in your arms,
especially some night when she lies sweating
afraid of the silence in the next room?
THE RELATIVITY OF MIDLIFE
When I was young, time was a desert stretching to the sea. A taste for salt and cowrie shells kept me on the move. Some days there were windstorms. Some days no oasis in sight. But everything was poetry, even the parched lips of camels, the sway of their haunches rhythmic as sex. Once, a plane fell from the sky, its wide hawk-like shadow foretelling the end of the story. Another traveler’s head caught the burning fuselage. To me, the blast was a firecracker, the buzz of a distant fly. I lay in tents woven of goat hair, wishing on the flecks in my lover’s eyes. Smells of roasted meat lingered in the air, on my fingers. My belly full to bursting with wine and dates too. Soon I would learn, most nights hold nothing but hard earth, and still I desired this journey to last and last.
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