Surrogates
After they all left home I started
making altars of their favorite childhood books
beloved things charged with small fingers
innocent curiosity, and little gifts
they gave me: silver Ganesha pendant
wire-wrapped and naked stones
Mercury dime to replace the one
I found in the garden years ago
that one of the boys lost.
Altars because I couldn’t hold them,
daily behold them, couldn’t protect them
from wanting to die inside their minds.
Through shrines I slowly learned
to banish fear, the illusion of control
from my bones, shoulders, nerves, gut
like a Catholic with her rosary and saints
like a witch with amulets and milk spells.
I perched their weathered books,
spines draped in rinpoches’ red strings
upon the cliffs of my own bookshelf
their covers theatrical backdrops
for miniature, plasticized thangkas
of loving mother deities, placid
and sharp-toothed, wild-eyed mothers
alongside family heirlooms
from the boys’ paternal grandfather
who entrusted me with antique relics—
little clay and brass buddhas from
his tour in Thailand, my favorite
the one with a bone inside you can hear
when you shake it like a rattle, that bone
some kind of promise. It’s the kind of thing
you might laugh and shake your head
about when I’m not around, or dead
or until you have adults of your own.
You can laugh. But know: I’ve seen what praying
with too many words and worry has done
to my mother’s nerves and night dreams
as if she thinks, falling asleep on her knees
her God needs a mother, a reminding, a litany
to help him log her children’s trials, the help we need.
My style is silence and effigy. Let the altars
do their thing, like clay proxies propped
in ancient Mesopotamian temples
their robbed, disproportionately large eye sockets
empty or, incredibly, full of alabaster with black
limestone or lapis pupils, pinpoints sipping
a confounding light, Goya eyes unblinking
before the gods of tragedy, hands folded
across their chests or abdomens
in surrogate supplication while their humans
went about their little lives, too fragile to rise
from bed, to work and worry at the same time.
