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I watched her wring our
Washing out
Red rags to
Sun’s bull
She taunted the world
That matador morning
In battered shoes,
The heels worn down
The liberator of her people
As dexterous with clothes line
As a fisher in his rigging
And equally at sea
Just as predisposed to drowning.
She captured me
Surely as I had jam-
jarred beetles
Caught me by
Imagination’s short and curlies
In the sun-streaked yard
Where domestic prehistory
Pushed between
The pie crust concrete
She sang to me an old song:
We once had owned expanses.
With the language of her hands
She told to me her soul
Is not this thing that stoops,
In a blue headscarf behind
The outhouse
It is not the
Burdensome serenity of
Mother Church
Or the nucleal ache
In the swell of the heart
It is that which
Redistributes her weight
From sagging shoulders
To muscled claves
She carried the world, then
Like a curate’s egg.
On a good day
My mother
Seemed to have stations of stars
One at each elbow
And knee
In darker times her hair hung
Between the daylight and
Her purpled face
And she excelled only at
Aloneness.
In the yard
Wringing washing
Was a good day
Her laughter undid doctrine
Her nature perfected
Her grace.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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Birthday
