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Little Bird

for Artie

The hottest month of the hottest year
on record. August in Texas. Unrelenting.

Mother had died just the month before.
My mother. The world kept burning.

And on the news, on our phones, all week the photos
of treasonous men, their arrogant mugshots

marring every screen, suffocating each sensible citizen.
How to breathe through the heat, through the spin

& the grief? How to rescue from harm what one loves?
When a red-feathered bird crashed into our window, it fell

like a stone & lay motionless. Little bird, you said
& stepped out to the porch, bent to stroke, to tap tap her still chest,

brought ice, brought tenderness, prayed mercy.
In the morning you spared me

from shoveling parched earth
& gave up the lost creature to ground.

You knew, knew I would not be able to bury her—
one more once beautiful thing.

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Keen

—a lamentation for the dead

In the hours just after, someone
said About the obituary, do me a favor.
Someone said Don’t use
her maiden name. Leave it out.

Someone said the dark web.
Someone’s high profile business executive
status. Identity theft! Identity theft!
Identity theft! someone said.

200 words is all we need. All someone’s
friends-in-the-know had said so.
I said 86 years of living. I said
our ancestors. I said Keene.

Keene Keene Keene Keene
Keene Keene Keene times two,
times ten, times twenty. I said
her name. I say it & say it & say.

I count. I wail. I ad infinitum.
Keene Keene Keene Keene. I sing
my mother out of this world.
I sing my mother back.

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Water

Make of me an emptiness,
a morning clear & present,

night’s terrors muted,
its details obscure.

Carve me. Crush me. Shadow-
shift me. Make me

a figure shining.

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For the Swan at White Rock

I visit you at sunset
for weeks on end, memorize

your slender neck, each movement,
slow white grace on our mud-thick lake.

Bright apparition
from the root of dusk,

you have seamed yourself
to the liquid lining of my vision,

dreamed your body into mine.
There in the space between sleep

and waking you float—a wild thing
mute

and unburdened.
Some have seen you fly.

I practice silence,
grow impractical white feathers.

I study the strength of white wings.

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When My Mother Forgets the Word for Dahlia

Picking a favorite dahlia is like going through a button box.
                                               - The Old Farmers Almanac

When my mother forgets the word for dahlia
it is February. It is the last day of her 84^th year, the latest day
in a ruthless unspooling of days, of pandemic lockdown,
its cruel isolation, & winter, all the gardens covered over,
all our lives fallow, fallow. When my mother forgets                                        
                                              
the word for dahlia, tall flower as familiar to her as a daughter,
its name soft as psalm on the tongue, it is yet another day
of all the distances between us—every long year apart,
every rocky geography, every hurt forgiven & not
forgiven. And in that instant every distance opens wide

its spacious arms as every distance collapses & gathers
as dahlia waits snug in its button box to be found, tucked
just out of memory’s reach until it passes like miracle into me,
blossoming into speech— dahlia I say through the phone & into
my mother’s frustrated silence, her solitary sorting, sorting, sorting.

I give her back the beloved, the favorite flower, the one
she knows but can no longer name. When my mother forgets
the word for dahlia, I drive in a blinding rain to the wizened women
at the nursery called Blue Moon. They will know. They will
know the flower I have come for.

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Floodplain

All morning in mid-labor
not ready for the hospital

walking the floodplain
the earth still soft
waters receded
tulip poplars
knotted sycamores
clumps of grass
ghosted with silt
the trees leaned downstream
from many floods
I clung to them
my sisters I thought if I thought at all
somehow the term did not seem wrong
the ground was washed bare
fibrous roots exposed
slack water
dusty with pollen
we walked and rested and walked again
bowing
then kneeling
to each contraction as it came
some bright bit of blue
caught on the far bank
without panic
I felt each crest carry me farther
away from you
away from familiar ground
in the spaces between
your hands
lightly—
the air on my face—
maybe I was the trees
their massive trunks shifting
as wind poured
through high branches
perhaps I was the riverbed
or the light as it pulsed between moving leaves
from all about us
a wordless insistence
deep in my interior
the forest the water rising

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Tundra Swans at Mason Neck

At any moment half the swans are airborne,
birds loping awkwardly into heavy flight
only to veer back for another splashdown,
their wakes unzipping the sky’s half-frozen image.
Over everything floats the constant,
urgent clamor of their multitudinous calling,
layered voices airy with an arctic emptiness
brought to this protected edge of a landscape
rivered by highways, its parking lots
glittering like open water from the air.
Another winter at the refuge,
though projections show their winter territory
leaping north within ten years. There’s no
permanence. Just this cacophonous splendor,
the children too now running in circles, flapping
and shouting, birds wheeling and landing and rising,
the winter marsh all wind and current and wing.

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Incarnate

            after Desiderio da Settignano’s marble tondo “Meeting of Christ 
            and John the Baptist as Youths”

Under Desiderio da Settignano’s tools, the two boys must have
pressed up and out as through a veil, a caul, the marble block

warmed by his polishing, as if stone were transmuting to skin,
mouths panting softly, opening, soft eyes opening in luminous

stone. Open. Open. That prayer of childbirth, a desperate
willed acceptance, choosing what can’t not be chosen: the body’s

dumb surrender. Be broken, torn; be opened, flayed; be naked,
shaking. Desiderio, what tore you open? Though your story’s lost,

these your stone children bear the sweet mark of sorrow,
and of the end you knew—John’s bearded head on a platter,

the gush of blood and water from Christ’s side,
and before the mystery of mysteries, the temple curtain

ripped in two. Oh, flesh. Wail, moan, be touched, be torn,
until we know the body to be nothing more than the wound

through which the spirit is pierced. Stay, stay, your chisel rang,
and fell silent. Almost six centuries later these two boys,

cut and hammered into existence, cannot stop themselves,
they must grasp each other. They are, yes, made flesh. Their hands

sink into John’s fleece tunic and they quiet themselves
to feel the heart repeating its one muffled note of astonishment.

How many times, Desiderio, did you put down your tools to touch
Christ’s cheek, here, where generations of living hands have rubbed

the sensuous marble smooth? Did you feel what Mary felt
as she touched Elizabeth—the stirring of a boy within the womb?

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Maternity Leave

My husband brings the baby and a kiss
to where I lie in milk-wet sheets,
ripe as a pomegranate,
slick and sweet.

Hello, little slippery mouth, hello
my blind little fish, right here
my squirming one,
all searching lips and squinched eyes,
limp as soon as he latches,
cheek and eyelid beaded with milk.

Already the air at the screen
is heavy and still, the light tinged
green by new leaves.

Look at me lounging, an odalisque.

At last the baby heaves himself off
the breast with a satisfied smack
and lolls into a milk-drunk stupor.

I hear my husband’s car
pull out of the driveway,
and then the neighbor’s car,
the one with the noisy muffler,
starts up and drives away.

Everyone’s busy but me.

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Postpartum

I keep coming back,
keep climbing the stairs
to push the button
that lets the slow notes fall,
keep making my face rise
like the moon over your crib,
keep letting my hand
be the weight to teach
your small body stillness.
Like lilies your fists unfurl.
Dusk obscures the corners
of the room, and the walls
expand, the way each day
since you came
has become an ocean,
the sharp pull of your need
through the shapeless hours
the thing that keeps me
from drowning.

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