Slicing into a tomato at the counter there is a question:
What language is strong enough? I remember my father,
and vegetables, and vegetable gardens—turning on
the sprinkler—turning it off—the soft fuzz of grass cut
days before swathing and sticking around my ankle bone.
Father, I think of you, yes. I wonder how much of your hair
has grayed, and if you remember how long it has been
and if you really were afraid of me when I raised my voice.
I still want to stick it to you, like the green painted spade,
a trellis the morning glories are climbing up. I want to take you
down, as far as I have been, your hand twisting my wrist
until I couldn’t feel my hand, had I been paying attention
to it, not combing the clear brown sea of your eyes for weeds
for things I was hoping I would find, floating, like kindness,
tenderness, some sign that you are human, that you have always
been made of something, but I never found any of that,
did I? I ask God if your eyes will ever make windows, and would
it be a good idea if I brought you over a dinner plate so,
for once, the beer in your belly, and the yellow sludge
from of other waste, will have better company?
Web
Sorry about the rabbit turds
that will inevitably smoosh themselves
into the tread of your shoe.
Because of the rain, the snow melted,
and because the snow melted,
the turds are there, and the air smells
the way that old cow barn across the street
did before they burned it to the ground.
The air smells like straw and mud,
like rabbit turds, but sometimes the air smells
like your hairspray, and when you turn
to look into the hands of that maple for the Blue Jay
you swore you saw fly up there, I am flooded
with the smell of your hairspray.
The smell of your hairspray pushes my breath
back into my throat, and it combs my throat
the way cigarette smoke combs my throat,
and I feel almost as if I am eating your hair,
but I can see your hair in front of me.
When your hair gets caught in the tree branches
while we are walking the sun hits it
and it looks like spider webs in the morning.
Your hair feels like spider webs, in the morning,
on my face. It feels like sticky spider webs when you
haven’t washed it the night before, and your hairspray
is still tangled in it, the way dew gets tangled in webs.
Your hair feels like spider webs, sticky with hair spray,
sprawling my left cheek, on the mornings when you haven’t washed
it the nights before. It sprawls my left cheek like a web
sprawls tree branches because you have moved so near to me.
When you have moved so near to me in the night, your hair
suffocating this day’s first breath, curling your thumb at the base
of my neck, the way a kitten taken from her mother too soon
curls her paws into any softness, I cannot help myself.
When you are curling your thumb at the base of my neck,
your breath so warm saturating the deepest well of my ear,
I lift my heavy hand and I take one long coil of hair
from your neck, and I wrap it and unwrap it in my fingers,
and I lift it to my nose, though I smell it already,
though it has already stopped my breath, I lay it across my mouth.
In Spirit
We are afraid she is not touching the bed,
our mother, levitating again,
lifting in her old bones lying
there, her mothballed nightgown
inflating as if it were a great
lung, her whole body pitching itself
to the slope of her voice, coming up
out of her like the fin of a fish
cutting the dark surface of water:
Do not kill me.
Our tongues are stuck to our teeth
while her voice stretches to us,
standing around her in suits, black,
we were tired, until she came at us
in spirit, yes,
is she here?
Her body lies on the bed, and I think of sliding
my hand beneath her shoulder blades just to see,
just to see if she has died yet.
I hope you enjoy them.
