After decades of laboring
in the gummy heat of tobacco
fields and the white columns
of spreadsheets, free time
feels unwarranted.
Your hands, dry with gullies,
spend new days busied. The dogs
have become fat Russets
waddling on toothpicks; the garage
is now organized by tool,
with the red rototiller
claiming a back
corner plot of concrete.
In the evening you still coat
your eyelids with Pond’s
cold cream and consider
the fragility of life, held
together by a whipstitch.
Up the mountain our mother stamps
the mud off her boot heels and presses
her thighs against the weathered Plexiglas
shielding the map of Jackson’s campaign
through the Shenandoah. She pretends
to be upset at my father, who drives
us by the truckload to bronze markers
and battlefields, against our will.
He’s left the clock radio in the garage
set on NPR, so that the hounds
we’ve left behind will grow smarter
and miss us less. She takes in the greens
of the valley, the smattering of tin cabins.
Hugging his belly, she tells
him we’ve been here a dozen
times, that he’s let his eccentricities creep
up on him, that normal people
don’t wear hunter’s orange year-round.
Below them the shale peels
off into a bare wall,
and their backs are to us.
Your pupils choke on light and
contemplate the intricacies of the
blinds on the wall. These shadow carvings
mark the staggered bases of
Mayan temples, gray and linear
like archaeological documents. A nurse offers
you tea, but the dead don’t
need sustenance.
You’ve let your heart
slide out onto the bedroom
floor; food for the cat,
and useful again.
Having suffered a seemingly endless
floorscape of corrugated metals
and wood grains, the child approaches
the lit display with curiosity.
The brightest swatches
hold prime real estate
at the top, where lemon shoulders
deep rose, tapering down to buttermilk
and mauve; powdered, more sensible
versions of themselves.
She thumbs the glossy
pigments until she is drawn
back into the murmuring
concrete river. As she tiptoes
beside the miniature
drawers housing categories
of bolts, a bottom-row
spectrum of lilacs bends
from her back pocket
like a grateful pianist.
I have known the rawness
of mornings, when the body
is all sockets warbling
with the traces of night;
dreams unfinished, stopped
short on the mind’s
bone precipice.
A whip-poor-
will’s distant
chiding. The rigidity
of hardwood floors. Lack
of saturation
in the colorless dawn.
Lugging myself
to the sink, on weak
stems, I bow to the medicine
cabinet and examine
the nets below
my lower lashes,
full of dusky moths.
Drawing the bath to half-empty, you roll
up the pants cuffs that have skimmed top layers
of puddles, mopping up sludge, and sidle
to the edge of the tub displaying bars
of lavender soaps, your silk underwear
draped above like worn flags of surrender.
Your foot soles appear lifeless in the clear
pool, waxy and dense. Releasing the syr-
inge, you steady yourself against the cool
white tiles as relief courses like honey
through your veins, wide as rivers. Bottles spill
their shampoos, turning the water milky
and slick. You fumble calmly at this time,
clutching some sense of romance in your prime.
The psychedelic poster of Mary
is tacked uneven on the wall, its lamination
sheening with light from the kitchen. The bulbs
are encased in a rectangle of hard plastic,
the kind that is patterned with diamonds
and hard to wipe down.
You’ve forgotten
about the pots in the sink, the days-old rice
and sauces, the spatulas gelled with egg
batter. For days you’ve popped
in only for clean work socks, with the rent neglected
and clothes left inside-out in heaps.
Close up, the Virgin’s eyes
house sombreros, and the roses
in her cloak sop up the tears
of peasants with their pink folds.
We sink knee-high in grasses
and send the blind cat scuttling
away, leg slung up on his back
like a sack of marbles – a testament
to years of skirting brambles
and wire fences, or winters spent
battling for a decent bed.
Pausing at the brick
stairs, we stand split-leveled
like admirals and snake
oil through the barrels, removing
gunk in smears. The residue
makes our palms
smell like coins.
I wipe the excess on an oak,
then on my jean fronts. You slouch
in the doorway, one hand bracing
the small of your back, the other high
against the jamb. We look
beyond the black doily edge
of the tree line, where the sky
blushes coral
and the clouds wear thin.
When the flowers I planted into the
foot of the hill as rough bulbs break from their
casings and shoot pliant green spears softly
through sponge-sod, reaching to the surface air,
I will be reminded of your hope that
you would for one final spring grow blossoms
so colorful and lush and delicate
the neighbors would linger outside your home
to comment on your bounty; and you would
forget that you were dying, for just a
moment, admiring the soft tulips veined
with pink, sprouting beside blue hydrangeas,
rooted deep. I will see your yard as whole
again, pulsing and bright, cycle complete.
Forgetting on some mornings in April
to water these, they’ll wait in the pale light,
thirsting for your touch. I will pretend to
understand soils, horticulture, living
things; I will approach the hill, bending low
against dirt, mint and my fingers mixing.
On the second revolution
the gondola dips,
releasing my hair
into the night;
pale ribbons curl
against the cool,
black cloth.
My mother is a waving
pink peanut, about to be swept
out with the beer cups
and wrappers rolling
in the grease-dust
below.
Coming down,
aluminum surfaces flash
the reds and yellows
of bulbs, and I do not see
her when passing by.
At the top, the moon
is halved
like an onion.
