Berlin 1917
What does she think about
while she stitches
pictures
of bees and flowers?
She’s dreaming of the days ahead,
so different than the ones that came.
Before her brother died in the Great War.
Before her husband disappeared in France.
Before her children brought home stolen food,
to fill the empty pots and pans.
Quietly she stitches
listens to each prick and the silky sound
of drawn red thread.
There are birds outside in the linden trees
No bombs or tanks or runaway steeds.
She looks up.
It’s almost time for coffee and the
little cakes baked just for
Sunday afternoon.
April 2008, 060809
People who used to know us
called us ‘sisters’
and rolled their eyes.
Our lives were braided together.
Knitted and knotted,
such dense texture
of opposite-ness,
yin-yang-ness.
Like silk with glass,
or wood and wire.
Our radiant, rare fabric.
Now the loops are looser.
A net to reach further,
from London to this far west small town.
(foggy, both.)
But we catch bright fishes in it.
Fishes and stars.
02/13/08; rev 02/20/08, 02/27/08
written for my friend Sara, whose birthday is today.
My mother was always frustrated
by the long strands that tangled
around the base of the toilet,
on the edge of door and floor.
Sneaking onto the kitchen counter
wrapping around soup ladles
and frying pan handles.
Strangling the buttons
on her sweater.
I couldn’t help it.
When I combed it
--oh so gently and starting with just a short section from the bottom
and then a little higher and higher
until it was shiny smooth and tangle free--
the loosened strands would float
glinting and serene, only mildly affected by gravity
in their travels through our house.
They would mesh with the cat’s hair
the dog’s hair
until the hall was full of tumbleweedy bundles
that she had to shepherd out the door
with the wide brush of the push broom
we usually used for the garage.
‘It’s a wonder you’re not bald,’ she’d say
around her chewing gum,
and she’d hug the blue broom handle
before she put it away.
We watched as the finches came, two at a time,
to lift each tender, fluffy jumble-bramble
of canine-feline-girl hair
and flit away, like the birds in Disney’s Cinderella,
carrying their newest duvet to the nest.
070908, rev 072008, rev 072908, rev 090408
They found a tumor
in Rosa’s head.
A disk the size
of a baseball
behind her ear.
Rosa’s not the first
I’ve heard of
with a mass
in her body
that doctors describe as
an ordinary object
Two I knew
had tumors the size of
grapefruits in their uterus
then there are the
pea-sized ones
in the breast
Melanomas
the size of dimes
If ever I have a tumor
I hope they consider
other objects
more extraordinary
pomegranates
edamame beans
a 10 thebe piece.
Rosa had a tumor
the size of a
shuttlecock.
091108;091508; 092008
I see her hand
in my hand
as I shell peas
her joints ache in my knees
when the skies light up
with fourth of july
I shudder at the bombs
of her childhood
last week we worried about birds
when the men came to fell
the wild trees in my front yard
my mother’s ghost
floats through me
on her way to other places
and at this brief intersection
of our two souls
i see through her eyes
hear through her ears
feel the rough ground
with two soles, tough like mine,
tender like hers.
July 7, 2008; rev 7/14/08
Along the sin of the beach debris line
among the finely chopped bones
white driftwood bones
I find perfect blue in a piece of plastic.
A piece of plastic
a shard, with uneven edges,
flat and anonymous,
well beyond the question
of what it once had been.
Don’t think of all the blue plastic
containers of cleanliness
(All, Swiffer, litter)
or bottles of motor oil
or maybe the last
remaining fragment
of a dollhouse door.
See only the perfect
blue of memory:
arcing sky
baby eye
jeans and pools
grandmother’s
second best
teapot.
012109, rev 032309
