Night One

Words concealed by day name themselves

to the dark.

The sky has thinned

to a line across the bedroom window

where stars repeat their useless infinities.

If I whisper their names to my mother

it isn't because they are the proper names of stars.

Why would she take them in now—

her ears shallow, the air trying to clear

itself of the end of life smells?

No, it's because without memory

there is nothing else to forgive.

Her last word wore thin two weeks ago.  And now

there is no dark

dark enough

for this particular silence.

Now her breathing sounds

as though she inhales the hundreds of tiny stars

snagging the night like knots

I can't undo no matter how hard I try—

polaris, ceti, cygni

among them.

Because any whole sentence

would break

its promise

and find god

opening again

like a pupil adjusting

to the absence of light.

Night Two

From her window

the snow blows over the front path

and erases the way out.

The deer never raise their heads;

the dormant landscape slips

under a tongue locked

in some other narrative—

the red-smoked twilights and my mother's hands knocking things over,

trembling with need, lugging her suitcase on her way

to the hotel room fucks, the pulsings of airline wings

then the 2AM lies to a child,

an ocean away. 

If I look closely I can see my mother weeping. 

But I don't know how to make her stop. 

Only here

I know how to make her eyes flutter

by pressing the delicate spot between her thumb and finger,

how to make her see my love is more than the slimmest red smoke

at twilight—

a sketch

of blood above her thighs, a certain thirst, a knife, the chilled swirl of scotch, a

supernatural wolf hiding in the pleats of dusk.

But, nothing I named in her world would make her stay with me.

O, a ring of her absence,

a thin syllable in my ear,

high pitched and begging me closer

to let other women show me

how to make a dress eat my waist,

how to palm my body aside from breast to breast

smooth the nipples down,

tongue words around a cock—

the shudder of my body

obsessed by what is lacking.

All I could do was fail, but I know

how to pry a center seed from the sumac

to find the startling white spot underneath.

I can embroider a pillowslip with tight stitches

so the buds rise pale pink to any edge.  I have learned

to keep her dead in the soundless fathoms where nothing else exists.

The red smoke, a frayed jet stream to follow across oceans.

I'd get down on my back

on the roof under my window when the dusk flooded the darkness,

and her thin features would transverse the sky of my fingertips. 

With each icy breath I'd hang paper birds

in her mouth

repeating

a name that must be mine. 

Night Three

What the breaking sound is

has something to do with the weight

of her watch—too heavy

to hold in midair

while the button she fumbles on her cuff

becomes too large for the thread

it is strung on.

And the tick curves

around this transparent landscape

of bone as I hold her wrist

away from the vase's tiny bits

and the sharp swells of water.

To calm her, my hands

must learn to touch

all over again with words

that smooth cornflowers

over her skin, memory

as light as pollen,

but even that is useless.

By the time the spill's cleaned up,

the pages of Anna Karenina

are blued by the wet blossoms

steeping the book's pages.

My mother's inward

gaze does not let go

as she bends forward to abandon

another room to her absence

like the moment a Zen master

leans toward non existence

but has not yet become it,

or the way the palm prints

of the dying

clutch the places of grief

on our bodies and want to put

the single petal

back on the flower.

Night Four

A shuffle of snow

dislodges the sky into an unfamiliar dimension.  How many mornings

have I sat next to her like this, my eyes

following the light's smallest movements along the eaves,

while shadows fingerprint

her face?  Through a blink, any shaft

sets off a sudden slide.

I wait for small adjustments—the tumblings to still,

drifts to be quiet.  But sleep never comes.  I try to understand how many hungers there are.

How many people

are pacing the floors in rooms, their thoughts stalled on bridges, and how many times do

their worlds break apart and start up again?

The snow

slants into the car window.  There is something she says about her lover's hair

falling forward when he's inside her.  Something about my father's burns and sudden

nausea.  How near the end even a wolf with a blackened penis slowly goes crazy.

And her words still sting my heart.

Sometimes during early winter mornings the clouds rearrange

the landscape,

and a shaft of light is disguised as the bridge where my mother stopped

thirty-five years ago.  The snow was thick and heavy, pouring out of the street lamp as if it

wanted to bury that car.

Night Five

The heaven that goes untended

is the first emptiness, but morphine takes her

wherever she wants: on a road curving

into steady flowers, to dreams spinning free

under waves of snow, or to grasses swaying

into cobwebs like sounds in a mute wind.

The lightest touch on her skin

makes the line to each curve on her body unfinished

as a train might stop in snow—every slowed turn

jerking against the metal track.  Pain carries

its weight straight down.

By now, her gown loosens

and a button imprints her wrist without

hurting.  Quiet shivers the air.  There's nothing

left but a veined transparency of shadows

the moon scrolls over leaves, the bedroom,

her hands the color of camellias.

Gone are the clocks faltering in the hallways,

the tricks of time arranging absence,

our phantom meetings under some

embracing willow in the back of my mind.

All I have left of her is what kept her

from me—that place where there aren't any tracks

after the deepest snow comes

low in the trees as the final exhale.