Matroyshka Dolls

for my mother

So many memories I can’t access but know.
I still own the I Can Read books you read to me--
flyleaf scrawled with my name in child’s careful cursive,
saved to read a thousand times to my kids--
but not the viscera of your voice reading them.

It is a small tragedy. Cosmic irony.

I have passed my voice through books
in endless silly accents against the truth
my children will forget my voice too.

This perhaps is the great loneliness
of motherhood: to be the only one to remember
the dream of raising a child raising you
into invisible servitude, constant, busy solitude.
How hard you try to hide the struggle,
remember where you buried the bone
of yourself, avoid the fall into empty holes.

As a mother forgets her own mouth
on her mother’s breast, so do her children
forget the lullabies she sang, thousands of meals,
imaginative games, lessons on magical rocks,
nearly every reassuring caress, except the ones
bookmarked by chronic, irreparable loss.

Doll. House. Family. Father.

Mother, I don’t remember
every bedtime, but my heart recalls them all
as one grand, archetypal Tuck In, complete
with prayer. The reverence of your voice,
its cadence washing over, eroding worry,
rhyming with every helpless mother’s prayer.
I know that ancient language in my cells.

Everything else is fog. We forget
our deepest happiness like we forget air.

I don’t remember being an egg in your body.
Small, quiet moon tucked inside the tiny nest
of your fetal ovary. Together we floated,
little astronauts, two Russian dolls
stacked inside your mother’s body.
I can’t remember, but I know.

We’ve been together from the beginning.

deep end

slick and sharp 

as a new needle, as a girl

I forced myself 

to jump feet first

incremental courage

nine feet, sixteen, thirty-three

pinching my nose

eyes clenched closed

belly coiling velocity

life rushed up stories

to swallow my inches

how we must live

stitching sky and water

to earth, back up for air

stitching us all together

we who don’t belong

to each other, miles 

of unknotted thread

trailing behind every dive

releasing the seam years 

and years behind me

Dog Psalms

1. God stares out the window for hours, surveying His domain. Everything smells of Him. He waits.

2. God wants to find a good, fresh bone on His walk, perhaps a tibia attached to a knee, still sour sweet. If he’s lucky, He can sneak it into the house before I close the door, curl up with it on His bed and chew Himself into a dream of a yipping chase in which He, exploding from His hiding place, lands His teeth exactly on a leg and wakes to find it so.

3. God is always begging to be scratched, to leave His musk upon my hands and through me touch the world.

4. God longs for a grungy god-couch upon which He can lie with me, kneading His silken ears, our hearts aligned, my morning breath and distant crotch thrilling His modest, omnipotent nose with my story of love and loss, and through my sorrow penetrate my soul. Perhaps you already know: God is an olfactory historian, a healer, a pleaser, a connoisseur of forgiveness.

5. God has brown eyes. I cradle His slim face. We take each other in, unblinking, oxytocin surging, mutual medicine.

6. Every evening, God begs me to walk with Him. When I emerge from the closet in my unwashed walking jeans, He smells what is in store. It sends Him into frenzy. He dances back and forth between me and my husband, a reluctant walker after a long day of work. Egging, wiggle-begging in ecstatic downward-god pose, He prances, tosses His head toward the door. Come on!

7. Tired as we are, we go with God.

with thanks to Rilke for the phrases explodes from his hiding place and the modesty to use sorrow in order to penetrate our soul

Betelgeuse

All light is former mass
she heard a man say.
Deep in the shape
she has made
rests a glass lotus, no,
a bottle of colored sand
swept from a mandala,
no, a black hand.
In the palm is a wheel.
It spins her into sets
of five limbs: arms, legs,
head, each arrayed
with five ways to take
the world, take it in:
five fingers, five toes,
five monstrous senses:
eyes, ears, mouth,
nose, skin. Some
centrifuge pulls her
out from a center
like carnival taffy or light,
a star exploding slowly
in the shoulder of Orion.
Up close, she shines.
From far enough away
she’s already dead.

with thanks to Rilke for lines 3 and 4

The Reverence of Dogs

Hank drops his humble offering
sat the feet of the household yard gods.
All winter, snow does what it does.
Generous, he lays down more. I do
what I do: ignore his poop till spring thaw.

St. Francis came crumbling with the garden
when we bought the house three years ago.
Face eroded, hips severed from legs, he leans
in crisp sedums against a post, blesses
the perfect pie of a rescued dog at his feet.

Gaia, kitschy relic of early motherhood,
green resin figurine gifted by a dying desert
midwife, perches sun-faded on a stump
in yarrow, smiles serenely over Earth belly
where there is still room for the turd in her lap.

Parinirvana Buddha’s resting head, small town
thrift store find, cracked, epoxied, spray painted
black,  idol I cannot let go nor forget, drifts
in the promise of daisies, eyes high on death,
sweet whiff of long-wintered dung, nearly dust.

doing nothing

I am done mutely berating myself
for avoiding doing things

I told myself I’d do on my days off.
I won’t do them till I do, or must.

Sweep the floor when the feet say.
Suck skin off chai when eyes

take a break from the dog eared page.
Write words to frustrate my future mud,

roll out clay, curl a slab into a cup
only when the body, empty, erupts.

Wonderland

Allison's witness doll
dancing masked
with an egg
with me
over a shallow grave
friends take turns in.
Heel to head
dirt mandorla:
I lie down
in a strange death
pasture, crack
toward sky, gravity
mixing grief, snow melt,
relief, eye water.
So many ways
to make mud.

(a combined response to Wonderland's Pandemic Philosophizing in conte crayon and her 2020 earth installation, Feral Nostalgia's Delicate Commonweath)

Little Rachel Dreams of Regeneration

In third grade,
I read Pets in a Jar
cover to cover,
renewed it for weeks
or maybe months,
until the librarian
reminded me other
kids might like it too.
For the rest of childhood
into my teens,
I sought planarians
in wet ditches
and culvert weeds,
scooped jars of murky water
from neighborhood ponds
crouched in cattail reeds.
I never found one,
would never know
if I had courage enough
to slit its funny face
between the eyes
and split its tail
into a fork to watch
it heal into a living
double-headed X,
or better yet, or worse,
a tiny headless man
with two legs, two arms,
two faces for hands,
four tiny, forgiving
eyes, now twice as wise
thanks to me.

Reteach a Thing its Loveliness

"…sometimes it is necessary/ to reteach a thing its loveliness,/ to put a hand on its brow…/ and retell it in words and in touch/ it is lovely/ until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing/ as St. Francis/ put his hand on the creased forehead/ of the sow…" Galway Kinnell

I’m not sure which I prefer—
a dog-ruined couch
felted with fur and saliva,
my heart unfurled
by that dog’s head on my lap,
mother-loneliness ruined
by unblinking brown eyes,
child-starved fingers sated
by silken ears and skull,
his musky scent a welcome
pocket of ancient wilderness
inside my home,

or this clean couch,
spotless but for drips
of coffee here and there,
bread crumbs tucked
in corded seams,
its arms stained
with my arms’ oils,
my heart in solitary repose
considering a poem
by Galway Kinnell
called “St. Francis
and the Sow,”
while my dog rests
over there on his bed,
his chin on the low
window sill, peering out,
a palm of morning light
upon his brow.

List of Dreams for Yeshe Walmo

Dead mouthed,
I stain red pillows
with drool.
Tape my lips.
My list of dreams
bore dreams.
They found me, bent
me, broke my face,
turned sons
to grandmothers,
trees to saviors,
daughters
to fathers, fire
to prayers.
Better not to list
one’s dreams.
This moment
the required dream.
Shake me, take
my head, bead it
on a twisted cord.
Wear it, blue one,
wake me.