Barbara Allen, The Wayfaring Stranger—but I also know
they must have been visited by a miracle
like the doctor removing the bandage from my husband’s
damaged eye, the new world rushing in.
Does the artist live to commemorate? Do the birds
long to sing? And how far have we traveled
to get here where a summer breeze unleashes
the scents of wild lavender and lily of the valley,
where every unmarked grave is covered with a carpet
of sweet alyssum, where the mother tanager sings
her softer song above the crowns of hemlock,
death bloom made poisonous when the blood
of Jesus seeped into its roots: Woomlick, Devil’s
Flower and Gypsy Flower, Break-Your-Mother’s-Heart.
Ideas of Heaven
My mother’s idea of heaven was a pulse, nurses
in white spilling light across fields with hurricane
lamps, bandage rolls, syringes, pain killers,
stethoscopes, pressure cuffs, patella hammers.
Twice she almost died herself, and so knew heaven
was not the light moving toward her but the lights
over the operating table, those five blue spheres
a spaceship’s landing gear hovering above
such alien beings as we are. My mother’s idea
of heaven was a jar of peanut butter and saltine
crackers, a patient’s chart and a pot of tea, notes
scribbled in her elegant hand: more Morphine,
Cortizone, Alprazolam. It was a quorum of doctors
in an elevator going up, blood swabbed from the walls,
the smell of bleach following her to the next bed,
the next crisis, the next head she would cradle like
a baby, rubbing gravel from a wound with a
green soap sponge. Plastic gloves, IV stands,
pocket light, Iris scissors, forceps, thermometer,
and her gold Caduceus emblem pin, its coiled snakes
and disembodied wings. Her shoes of breathable
white leather, stain-resistant, slip-resistant, padded
collars, 4-ply pillow-top insole, their signature blue hearts.
Her heaven was smoking Kents while feeding crows
in the parking lot, The God of Sleep, twenty minutes
of uninterrupted unconsciousness, an abyssal cot
in the break room next to a broken ventilator, flat
on her back, her split-shift night-shift back, her spine
with its bolts and bent crossbars, its stripped screws
and bony overgrowths, fusions and cages and allografts.
She was a shaft of light in the inner workings, her touch
a tincture, a gauze dressing, a salve, a room-temp
saline bath. She microwaved blankets
to slide over the dead so when the ones
who loved them filed in to say goodbye,
the body felt warm under their hands.
Crow
When the air conditioner comes on it sounds for all the world
like my mother clearing her throat, and then sighing.
After she died I’d shudder and look up
expecting to see her ghost. I wasn’t afraid, only hopeful.
To see her again, to hear her knees creak, her knuckles
pop, the ash of her cigarette hiss and flare.
She gargled with salt water, spit it into the sink,
grabbed the phone with her claw, the back of her head
sleek as a crow. My mother is a crow on my lawn,
laughing with the others, flapping up on a branch,
jerking and twisting her ruffed neck, looking around.
I find her everywhere, her eyes staring out from aspen bark,
the rivers of her hands, the horse’s ankle bones.
Astounding such delicacy could bear such terrible weight.
Ode to Gray
Mourning dove. Goose. Catbird. Butcher bird. Heron.
A child’s plush stuffed rabbit. Buckets. Chains.
Silver. Slate. Steel. Thistle. Tin.
Old man. Old woman.
The new screen door.
A squadron of Mirage F-1’s dogfighting
above ground fog. Sprites. Smoke.
“Snapshot gray” circa 1952.
Foxes. Rats. Nails. Wolves. River stones. Whales.
Brains. Newspapers. The backs of dead hands.
The sky over the ocean just before the clouds
let down their rain.
Rain.
The sea just before the clouds
let down their nets of rain.
Angelfish. Hooks. Hummingbird nests.
Teak wood. Seal whiskers. Silos. Railroad ties.
Mushrooms. Dray horses. Sage. Clay. Driftwood.
Crayfish in a stainless steel bowl.
The eyes of a certain girl.
Grain.
Moonlight pours down
without mercy, no matter
how many have perished
beneath the trees.
The river rolls on.
There will always be
silence, no matter
how long someone
has wept against
the side of a house,
bare forearms pressed
to the shingles.
Everything ends.
Even pain, even sorrow.
The swans drift on.
Reeds bear the weight
of their feathery heads.
Pebbles grow smaller,
smoother beneath night’s
rough currents. We walk
long distances, carting
our bags, our packages.
Burdens or gifts.
We know the land
is disappearing beneath
the sea, islands swallowed
like prehistoric fish.
We know we are doomed,
done for, damned, and still
the light reaches us, falls
on our shoulders even now,
even here where the moon is
hidden from us, even though
the stars are so far away.
Error’s Refuge
Some things happen only once.
A molar pulled is gone forever,
a thrown spark. The invention
of the internal combustion engine,
the rivening blade of the axe,
the first axe. First flight,
ice, light, math, birth.
And death,
we think, happens only once,
though many of us hold to the belief
some residue transcends,
some fine filament that lingers on,
the body gone into a stream of purity,
the brain a blown fuse that leaves
a bright flash, rib of arc light,
nickel’s worth of energy cast out
as seed onto the friable air, weed stem
of electricity that grows no matter
how often it’s hacked back,
the 21 grams we long to trust:
the soul surrendering its host.
Who could blame us for once
taking refuge in the atom’s
indestructibility. We did not
invent dust but can create
great waves that envelop cities,
sunder mountains of trees, render
vast swaths of water and earth
radioactive into eternity.
Once upon a time . . .
we begin our saddest stories.
Once bitten. Once burned.
Once in a blue moon. Once more
unto the breach. We die a while
into each other’s arms and are
reborn like Lazarus, like Jesus.
Once we were warriors. Once,
eons ago, some of us
turned
our backs to the fire, and some
were annihilated by love.
Augusta, Maine, 1951
Who was the man who ran the bait stand,
wiry and bluff, his cap’s faded logo
a hooked fish, faint, barely there,
sitting on an upturned milk crate at a card table,
Igloo coolers filled with glass eels set like a row
of saltbox houses, red with squat white roofs,
near a roadside patch of briars, a black-domed grill
cooking up a batch of hot dogs, white-bread buns
wrapped in reused tin foil, puffs of steam
escaping from the cracked blackened folds,
some unnamable, maybe flammable, amber liquid
in a mason jar from which he sipped as the sun
blared down, blot on the blue summer sky?
This is a portrait of the father I never knew,
a snapshot taken by my mother the year
before I was born, before he left this photograph
to work with the other men filing into
the brick paper mill along the Kennebec River,
the roped backs of his hands growing paler
each day, sawdust on his shoes, duff in his lungs.
But weren’t they beautiful? Those nights
on the dance floor. Her black satin skirt.
Her ankles flashing. His white cuffs rolled up,
exposing his wrists as he spun her.
Where is it written that a man must love the child
he fathers, hold her through the night and into
the shank of morning, must work to feed her,
clothe her, stuff trinkets in his pockets, hide one
in a mysterious hand held behind his back,
telling her to choose? It’s anyone’s guess.
I will never know the man who sat by the road
that led to the ocean, though I swam
between his hip bones, lived in that kingdom,
that great secret sea, my heart
smaller than a spark inside a tadpole
smaller than a grain of salt.
Chair
Oh the thuggish dusk, the brackish dawn, morning
cantilevered over the trees, afternoons doing nothing
again and again, like pushups. Like watching
a redwood grow: fast and slow at the same time.
Clock ticks: each minute a year in your ear.
The days are filled with such blandishments, nights
brandishing their full-blown stars, the decade’s
rickety bridges, baskets of magazines open-winged
on the porch, rusted wind vanes pointing north, cows
drowsing in clumps on the hills. Will you ever come back?
Will I welcome you again into this house? There are staircases
sewn to the walls throwing bolts of deckled light.
Let’s breathe that air. You could sit in a chair, right here.
Urn
I feel her swaying
under the earth, deep
in a basket of tree roots,
their frayed silk
keeping her calm,
a carpet of grass singing
Nearer my god to thee,
oak branches groaning in wind
coming up from the sea.
We take on trust the dead
are buried and gone,
the light doused for eternity,
the nevermore of their particulars
ground up, dispersed.
As a child I didn’t know
where the light went
when she flipped the switch,
though I once touched
the dark bulb that burned
my fingertips, studied the coiled
element trapped inside
seething with afterglow.
Arizona
The last time I saw my mother
she was sitting on the back patio
in her nightgown, a robe
thrown over her shoulders, the elbows
gone sheer from wear.
It was three months before her death.
She was hunched above one of the last
crossword puzzles she would ever
solve, her brow furrowed
over a seven-letter word for tooth.
I was staying at a cheap hotel, the kind
where everyone stands outside
their front door to smoke, a cup
of hotel coffee balanced
on the butt end of the air conditioner,
blasting its cold fumes over
the unmade bed. The outdoor
speakers played Take It Easy
on a loop, and By the Time
I Get to Phoenix and Get Back.
It wasn’t the best visit. My sister’s house
was filled with dogs, half-grown kids
and piles of dirty clothes. No food
in the fridge so we went out
and got tacos, enchiladas and burritos
from the Filibertos a few blocks away,
a squat tub of guacamole and chips,
tumblers of horchata, orange Fanta
and Mr. Pibb, a thousand napkins.
Everyone was happy while they chewed.
The state of Arizona is a box of heat
wedged between Las Vegas and Albuquerque.
Not a good place to be poor or get sick or die.
My mother rode a train from Maine in 1953
—she was just a girl, me bundled in her arms—
all the way to California. I’ve tried to imagine it.
If you continue west on Route 66
it will branch upward and dump you
into the spangle of Santa Monica
where I used to live, and then you can
drive Highway One almost all the way up
the Redwood Coast to Mendocino.
I used to do that. I probably spent more time
in my car than any house I lived in.
My mother never knew where I was.
She’d call and leave a message,
“This is your mother” (as if I might not
recognize her voice), “and I’m just wondering
where you are in these United States.”
She used to make me laugh. The whole family
was funny as hell, once. Dinnertime was like
a green room full of stand-up comics.
That day, sitting with them over spilled salsa,
I saw the damage booze and meth can do
to a row of faces. The jokes were tired
and the windows behind them filled
with hot white sky, plain as day.
When I got back to the hotel it was getting dark,
but it had cooled off so I took a walk around
the parking lot. Strangers leaned out over
their second-floor balconies and shouted down
at their friends traipsing away in thin
hotel towels toward the tepid blue pool.
The moon was up, struggling to unsnag itself
from the thorny crowns of the honey locusts,
the stunted curbside pines.
I left my tall mother on the couch where
she was sleeping, flat on her back, her robe
now a blanket, her rainbow-striped socks
sticking out like the bad witch beneath
the house in the Wizard of Oz. But she
was not a bad witch, nor was she Glinda,
that was my mother’s brother’s wife’s name.
We called her the bad witch behind her back.
My mother still wore her wedding ring,
even after she remarried. Why spend good money
on a new one when she liked this one perfectly well.
She always touched it like a talisman,
fretted it around her bony finger.
Three kinds of braided gold: white, rose and yellow
.
By the end, the only thing keeping it
from slipping off was her arthritic knuckle.
I don’t know what my sister did with it
after she died. I wonder if all that gold
was melted down in a crucible, the colors
mixing, a muddy nugget.
I do know that Route 66, in addition
to being called the Will Rogers Highway
and The Main Street of America,
was also known as the Mother Road,
from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
My mother looked like a woman Walker Evans
might have photographed, with her dark
wavy hair, wide forehead and high cheekbones,
one veined hand clutching her sweater at the collar,
her face a map of every place she’d been,
every floor she scrubbed, every book she’d read,
every ungrateful child she birthed that lived or died,
every hungry upturned mouth she fed,
every beer she drank, every unslept night,
every cigarette, every song gone out of her,
every failure. Severe, you might say.
She always looked slightly haughty,
glamorous and famished.
I saw all the cars parked in that lot and wanted
to hotwire one with a good radio, drive away,
keep driving until the ocean stopped me,
then hairpin up the coast and arrive
like an orphan at Canada’s front door.
If I’d known I’d never see my mother again,