You sounded just like your mother when you said that.
	My wife, in conversation

Her last two years, she did not speak,
then death sealed fast her lips, and fire
consumed the lips completely.  What
could still today remain of her,
whose ashes go to ground beneath
a dusty Texas family plot?

Her genes, of course, passed down, survive.
I see them in the wary smile
my niece presents.  They hold their place
within my daughter’s deep-set eyes
and delicately sculpt the chin
upon her new great-grandchild’s face.

Yet more, incredibly, survived,
for when the elemental stuff
that formed the individual
went back into the melting pot,
a part of her remained alive,
escaping from its human cell.

Evanescent as a breath,
a voice first heard in utero
outlived its owner to become
a lasting presence in my speech,
transformed, yet recognizable,
in strictest sense, my mother tongue.
                        

Seated around their campfires two days out
of St. Joe, hopeful, thinking themselves steeled
against all woes to come, they hear the scout
rebuke their confidence, “Keep your eyes peeled —
from here on, we’re in Injun country!”  Sight
and sound become distrusted, blurred by fear.
The land and its inhabitants unite
to speak as one: We Do Not Want You Here.

The warnings in those Westerns taught a child,
a day will find you drained and plodding, mocked
by brutal sun, your every hope defiled,
while high upon the ridgeline stands a troop
of hostiles, wearing war paint, arrows nocked.
They watch you, stony-faced.  And then they swoop.