Crossing Tacoma Bridges with My Pregnant Daughter

I notice moss in the cracks of the peeling white footbridge.

Its wooden arms reach across the tracks of trains

that crawl through the belly of Titlow Park. We stop,

hands on the railing, look down, look into the woods

where tracks disappear, look through foliage to the Sound.

Days later, on another walk over Narrows Bridge, I notice twin

crisscross symmetries of early metal towers perched on piers

mirroring newer concrete ones; sage green suspension cables—

sloped, parallel, curving pipes she says her family of firefighters

climb, clipped into handrails, to the tops of tower saddles

where they rappel to the Sound to practice emergency

rescue. It is my privilege to notice only moss and eras

of architecture after a bridge has collapsed, to feel my nerves

jolt with the thought of her precarious ascents and descents.

Beneath, or perhaps, transparently overlaid like thin skin

upon these rare moments of our togetherness, my daughter

also sees bodies leapt upon tracks, a beloved, sad dispatcher

scattered by a train, crushed women and men floating

on the Sound that rushed up like pure despair, that liquid body

like unforgiving, then forgiving, concrete. Every so many yards,

a sign is posted on the bridge that makes a promise:

“There is always hope,” followed by a number to call

that ends with TALK. We don’t. Standing there, suspended,

we span memories of a bullet hole in a wooden floor,

a hoodie pulled up to spare our eyes a rope burned neck.

We take in the view of the ragged, verdant shore, our ears

lashed by traffic’s knives. She says, “I can still hear the frogs….

Listen, what is that called?” Susurrus, I say. We pause. Listen.

“Through the Woods,” by Jason Abington

photo by Carson Diaz

Lines Before Dawn

When the house is no longer simply a place where I wake

to get ready for work, a launch pad to a school—

and instead, by leisure, has become a dark sky twinkling

constellations of sleeping machines, bright clusters

of red, white, green and blue lights, and I have wandered

into my youngest grown son’s room to find a black hole

where no light switches or charging phones glow—it is time

to step out onto the peeling deck with my forgotten feet,

thin socked, my mother’s silent, soft blanket wrapped around me.

No swishing materials of my body to steal peace, I look up.

Deep space offers its trail of ancient smoke and tiny stars.

Planets I can’t name are aligned, planets I learned earlier online.

There they are. Two meteors draw their lines across the night

like a sweet girl drawing then erasing her marks.

Size 14 Secret Security

Her love has left his giant boots

in the foyer

for as long as she’s known him.

Clutter, she always thought,

another thing to put in order

until the day he told her

he leaves them where

the window in the door

affords a view to a warning.

Nasturtiums

Even wrathful beings start out small—

in this case, like tiny, dehydrated testes,

white and wrinkled, promising

protection despite your lack

of faith. You can’t believe it

when green coins form, shallow bowls

for single rain drops. Such pools

foretell pestilence—the crystal balls

of lady bugs and praying mantises

hunkered down in wait, watching

blood red, orange and yellow

blooms unfold themselves like warm

aureoles, ladies’ fans, lips laced

with pepper—so festive, so sharp

on a salad, a human tongue, so repugnant

to aphids and flies they’ll take

their colonizing fleet elsewhere,

to your naïve neighbors’ garden,

buzzing their national anthem all the way.

Spring Beauties

Look, Momma, sping booties, sping booties!

~Sage Magdelene, age 3

It is not Groundhog Day exactly.

There are major mistakes to right. I cannot.

No endless re-tries or deadening repetitions.

No escape. It is just these seven small rooms,

full of the dust and scent of living—coffee,

salty sheets, cut pine, March dog, wood smoke.

It is these sandy trails where daily I greet

my own shoe tread of yesterday,

notice my gait, step off-register, new.

It is the real smile in my love’s morning eyes,

that softness he reserves for me, my hands.

It is my body remembering three toddlers’

heft in night dreams, that sweet grief.

It is the checking of screens for evidence

of their fractal lives spinning presence

off of me, our curving Mandelbrot set

of mothers, my first grandchild sprouting.

It is the digital taking-in of their encounters

with simple, complicated, horrible beauty,

that glimpse of what they do, now grown,

with epigenetic inheritance, that best thing

I had to give. Look, I would say. Look.

This little pink flower, this bliss, this thick sadness,

this roaring rage, let’s look at it together,

squat before it pink and green on solid feet,

shake songs from chromosomal chains and winter.

Let’s sigh, touch the fragile petals.

They won’t stay long. Look, there they go.

Reclining Piñon

The piñon reclines parallel to earth like Manet’s Olympia—

stark, of service, sturdy, propped up on her own stripped limbs.

A full length of bark has died along the south side of her trunk,

left her core exposed, sun-bleached. The north side is rich

with thick bark, pulling life from roots still clutching arroyo wall.

Unlike Olympia, she is not bored when I, a john of sorts,

stand before her. She doesn’t care I am mixing metaphors

in the attempt to get out of my head, into my old body.

Above, green needles spread across a low canopy I can sit beneath.

Like a child on a still swing, I could perch on the horizontal trunk,

clutch branches like two cold chains, kick my legs to nowhere, pretend

this is a bonsai and I am so much smaller than I am. I could

rub against its cave of hard roots, half exposed, shed my tube of skin,

leave a transparent face dangling in the gentle wind.

Stray

Hank didn’t mean to nip my wrist

but he did

straining against my hand in his collar

wrenching

him back with all my weight

his burning leash

zipping through my palms

as he lurched

snarl-barking, vicious with self-defense

as the collarless

muscled neighbor dog rushed beneath

its own fence

the one Hank has puckishly pissed against

for years on daily walks

both dogs hoping it would come to this

wistfully reliving

their days in the streets as wary, wiry strays

starved sovereigns

guarding trash and shifting margins

before the rescue,

the softening, the new name morphing

daily into

a litany of canine emasculation:

Hankster, Bubby

Hanky Poo, Boo Boo, My Little Fuzzyman.

Rilke says now it is time that gods came walking out of lived-in Things

like this book, the one who takes these words

into its skin—sloppy tattoos, and all the books

upon my shelf, a dusty thousand toothed grin

like the bed who holds us, my lover and me

in its palm, and the softest offering of birds

a heavy down upon us, gentle disembodied flock

like the paper lamp he clicks off every night

he and yellow light looking into my eyes just before

dark silence takes the room against its chest

like the woodstove with its hunger

its winter mouth, its flickering tongue

licking at what’s left of trees to warn us

like the truck, the roaming growl of his truck

announcing him for miles across the foot

of this mountain, a voice delivering him to me

like the secondhand couch we once argued about

now a wide lap of ease, worn out by our bodies

sinking toward the center gap, each other

like the convection oven god who serves

us orange salmon on blue plates, or the black pan

who kisses our green chicken eggs good morning

disrobed of the mundane, walking out, what more

could such gods do or say or want, these gods in Things

who love in such excruciating detail they stay

hunger and heat

too cold to lower the honeycomb blind

the suet basket hangs empty for weeks

as if, when I am not a window witness

of their frozen feast, the nuthatch

pinon jay and chickadee are not hungry

after supper haiku

the kitchen faucet drips songs

upon the pool in a soaking pot

the scent of spent soup, a soul