We're passing through your city gates.
I'm Willie Nelson overdressed,
overjoyed at prospects of weak poetry.
This reading tour will take us through
the riverbed of San Rafael.
That number I'm afraid to dial.
Will fertile soil at ninety now
be specks of scattered grain despair?
Your health retreats like armies shamed,
tearing its sleeve on wire fences.
War gave your mind a camera lens
for longing eyes attached to statue liberty.
A Yugoslav with maids and servants—
tulip beds as large as oceans spreading wings.
All reduced by German tanks
with treads of ripping rifle fire.

I look at your accomplishments
like gifts of bibles in a pew
my bleeding fingers race across.
I've married for the final time.
A man you'll love. His tenderness
is orchids opening their palms
to psalms of sunlight in our bed.
The child of my book was born—
and God, your life has won awards.
I've met more knives, grown gray hair.
They're such plain cobwebs set beside
the columns of your heritage.

I still recall the things you wrote
on pictures that you took of me—
surrounded by the summer flowers
and lunch pail wisdoms of your words.
Your "Botticelli Angel" now
has turned into a bottlebrush;
published Brillo pads of shame
scrubbing toilets, acid tears.
Building a name from broken parts
like shattered tea cups glued in place.

Your deafness grows each time we speak.
I press my ear against your tongue—
candle wax that hugs a wick
to keep erection firm and straight.
Scents of your nobility float
like drifts of old perfume
above the salt of daily life.
I'm hammering those barriers.
The telephone is in my hand.
That number I'm afraid to call.
For death might answer callously.

While his wife suited up
for Sunday church,
donned her hat, painted her nails
in cherry red, polished her shoes,
baked brownies
for the cookie hour,
George studied the clouds,
taking notes on brewing maelstrom
as if it were a sack of silver
trading wares of mysteries.

Their thunder was a cough, he said.
Rain is sweat around a glass.
Onyx sky holds deep rewards
for those who rifle through
its meat and tension of its misery.
Bird and bone and ivory
against the blackness hovering.

He believed they sensed things
we did not like dogs
sniff danger near a child,
like cotton balls absorb fresh blood.
That bodies were a short-term play
on slippery stage—a screen saver
that disappeared when
God moved his mouse.

No reminiscence lay like stys
in squinted minds of growing up;
"three" was too young to
capture the scent of your chestnut hair
brushing falling shoulder blades.
Troubled moments bubbled,
popped, wiggled from the vice's grip.
I quiz my father awkwardly,
knowing ink sac tears undress
the ache and leave it there.
Hats on beer are pillow talk,
white Dixie cups with licenses.
I cannot love but must forgive
the nature of his meek escape.

He sees through prisms of forgetting
just how deep your dimples sat.
Your voice not saved
like headlines of a tragedy
that come too close to blinding hues.
Your life a text of finches
on a sizzled wire he learned to close
before those ghosts became
depression's nuts and bolts
and molten lava in his head.
Your death was bookmarks on a page
my infant pupils could not read.
My pen a lint brush rolled on black
and coming up with wrinkled flesh.
Craving just one mother/daughter memory
to tan warm hides of diaries
and tame the cloaks of grieving shrews.

Getting us to spill our ghosts,
their shrouds and clouds in grieving glue,
has, well, become that urgency
blowing salt in open wound.
I play the needled beak of a woodpecker
hacking at studied granite,
wishing fabric of the weak
had porous, easy entry points.
Sulking in the moss of forest
wetter than what's capable.

Tea bags under restless eyes
looking for ceramic plates.
I'm staples in a microwave
going near explosive cells.
Textures no one talks about,
our sauerkraut and clinging moths.
Unspoken sadness in the breeze
like hummingbirds with busy wings.
Searching through the saccharine
for tiny seeds of honesty.

You plead with me:
"Write about an orange sunset,
barking dogs, happy neighbors
hanging working Christmas lights."
My books are dirty underwear
no one wants to read or drink.
Lucidity on terror's tongue.
The thought of getting high
on foibles rattles all the nuts
and bolts and perfect screws
we've dedicated hands
and lives to tightening.
Empty bottles in the trash
crossing squares of calendars.
A poem magnifies a stain,
speaking the unspeakable.

Wrinkled quilts beneath your eyes
remind me where a warmth once lay.
I see your hands at bedside
after surgery, combing my hair
in tender tugs as if you're brushing
balding spots around the corner
from our smiles.
I slip my fingers through the rails,
roped and saddled by IVs.
A blood bag just above my head,
watching crimson dripping down,
petals into painful graves.

You confuse me.
Some days, the mug is full of soup,
soft celery and yellow corn,
and noodles tearing in the heat.
Some days stocked with Chardonnay.
Others just flat emptiness
like skirts of kites wrapped
for gifts but never strung
against the wind.

I never know what fill to trust.
Is all my dizzy busyness
at birthday time a woodpecker
hammering granite glass?
Am I walking miles and miles
to lead you down a retreating beach,
where I'll be left and you'll be
swimming in your pills?
Climbing steps for evergreens,
discovering a plastic tree.
We might have been such sculpted love,
a mother/daughter piece of art.
We are sand that should be clay.
Ground poison blowing at our feet.