My mother rocks me in the chair 
her grandfather made of the hard pine 
abundant at century’s turn, carved 
into the chair back’s burnished wood 
an abstract fleur de lis I could poke 
my fingers through as a child.   

I’m not a year and my mother’s already crying. 
She’d float in sorrow’s glimmer, the marine-
blue lake her place of devotion, finding no other 
companion in nature.  I’d look for her 
on that shore where for all her days
she beckoned me to join her.   

Perhaps this memory’s false, 
I never heard my mother sing, 
Sadness is good, in perfect pitch, 	
but only imagined how the rocking chair 
held her as she—seeing nothing
would ever change—steeled herself.
                        

My first husband, zany as a sunflower,
tart as sauerkraut, undertook 
infidelity as if he were climbing 
a mountain under a bright blue sky.  
Off he’d go for the summit, 
trailing the paraphernalia of lies
like gorp.  Although faithful, 
I knew well the binary narratives 
of self-pity, and didn’t doubt
that when the mountain burned,
I’d be the slurry, but I’d no 
understanding of logarithmic 
power, how he multiplied us 
and how many we eventually 
became. You just can’t use lovers 
like napkins, I said, when at last 
I understood. No, of course, 
let the pin prick, truth
though rude be medicinal, 
and a pathology remain
unredeemed by myth.
                        

Would you say You’re falling
to the starry sky?  You’re dirt
to the root pushing a sprout up
through earth’s crust? Go fiddle
to the Apocalypse?  Go figure
to the geometry of disease? 
Come again to the Magi? Wait
when spring’s about to bloom?

A thought or impulse arrives
before movement, at times pausing 
speech, which can be thought better 
of. In silence you pray that trouble 
curtail hatred, and bitter with sorrow 
sweeten, to keep the possible possible.