After a life of raising
all things around her,
flowers, sky, boys and girls,
she died quietly
in her bed
on a Sunday.

She was a jar of good honey,
the lovesong magick
of bees and pollen,
my hands and face sticky
with her golden closeness
for two decades.

She was living milk
of bodies
and stars,
immense
and endless. 

She broke curses
like eggs,
learned bravery
from barnyards. 

She was a rosebush oracle,
a worry of thorns
and the deep blush
of color;
every cut,
just another chance
to heal.

She was the snowball bush
out back,
catching fire in the thick heat
of August, shouting how soft
it was to fall
as she drifted,
free, to the earth.

She drew the smoke of breath
through a clamped mouth
at the end,
began bluing
in all the right places.

I wept warm air
on her fingertips,
asked if I could read
to her.

She told me with the wrinkles
in her skin
that they loved poetry
where she was going,
that she wouldn’t miss
a thing,
that she was only
evaporating
in the sun.

In a dream
I heard her breathing
tire,
slow,
linger,
stop.

I held out my hands
as children do,
felt her touch me
as she turned
to go.

I gathered her castoffs,
small petals
by her bed,
stripped of their stamen,
one by one. 

I leaned in once more
to kiss the mask
of her body;

her cheeks, furrows
of ploughshare;
her lips,
totems of rain.

There are three in this family,
brothers who tower
in the backlight.
A trinity of bad blood
engraved like a sad secret
on the inner lip of a tarnished ring.
A broken vow burned
into skin.

They had rebar for arteries,
restlessness for succor.
They were Bedouins of chaos,
wreckage of spilled oil and machinery.
They were screws turned so far the threads gave out
and nothing ever fit right again.

They swayed like drunken tar pits
holding the bones of dead epics.

They were hardscrabble blueprints,
made from dirt and sawdust,
beer stained and lock jawed,
every finger seeking a trigger,
every fist,
a face.

They were powder-shot mirrors,
the numb of cocaine teeth,
Quaaludes and marijuana,
good music and bad omens.

They were one too many bullfights
with no red cape to draw them
from the bystanders.

They wore childhood like a razorblade raincoat,
started smoking in second grade,
pretended they were Superman,
broke ribs jumping from the smokehouse roof,
stole chainsaws for beer,
dealt drugs in boxes of chicken
out of the Henny Penny on Market Street,
lifted gold rings from display cases,
smooth as creek water,
slick as owl shit.

They grew into shadows of men,
slit eyes peeking color at the sun,
held pale skin and called it love,
wild hair and full lips,
strange nights beneath a borrowed moon,
wept at the news of pregnancy,
grasped the turning of sour,
tried to bleed the sickness,
time ticking,
time standing still,
every breath more ragged
than the last.

They raged, whiskey crab-crawled on beaches
while their children watched big eyed
in the surf,
swallowing the stranglehold of madness,
feeling its pistons lifting and falling,
lifting and falling in their own blood,
hoping to never be
like their fathers.

They were tender inside,
swollen from all the gnashing of wolves,
the flailing of something broken
they could never name.

They threatened their families,
promised death and dismemberment,
got wasted and ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills,
walked around the driveway,
gun to head,
cocked and ready,
until they fell over,
lulled comatose,
soundless and emptied.

They woke up in the hospital,
fought the embrace of four-point restraints,
screamed anger in muddled vowels,
begged the nurses
for release.

They tried to exorcise their evil,
sat stock still in the church house,
red pews and red letters,
hallelujahs stricken from the backbone,
a chain gang driving splinters beneath the steeple,
and they could never hold onto Jesus,
no matter how hard they tried.

They still showed up drunk to family reunions,
still slapped their children full in the face,
still hated their women and themselves,
and above all other things,
wished to be taken
from this earth.

They gave their demons names,
learned to speak them better
than their own,
made room inside themselves
for the devil
and waited for the sun
to go down
each night.

And they are all gone now,
betrayed by weakened hearts
woven from the fabric of rust and rain,
rotted valves taken from turbines,
their pulses, the snapping
of belts
before a beating.

They dropped dead on porches,
threw clots hard into lung walls,
went out swinging with concrete arms
in a heart-attack finale,
faces black with the struggle
to breathe.

They were too fast and too soon,
great and terrible giants of men,
engines of maelstrom cut from brimstone,
fit for ancient cities and playground myths.

They were larger than the lives they built from glass and metal,
longer than the trail of debris they left behind them.

Their legacy is the dark of a widow’s cellar,
a copperhead room untouched by sun.

And it is deeper than the chasms they fell into,
deeper than the holes
we buried them in.

There was another room,
one I didn’t speak of.
A room inside a room.
A room made for hiding
in the shadows.

Two walls were papered
with flowers,
the other two painted pink.
A five-year-old girl’s room.
My room.

The rest of the house was midnight,
Georgia Street lamplight gnawing at the windows,
leaving patterns on the worn wood floor,
imaginings of great and stormy creatures
rising from the toy box
in the night.

But not all beasts are mythical.

The hallway shunned our gathering,
too narrow to fit us when our chests
became bellows,
when we swelled to fill the silence
of castaway
with bitter weeping,
and he moved to fill our emptiness
with a roaring so impossibly loud
I thought the walls would give
around us.

I remember the sound the bathroom door made
when he put his fist through it,
inches away from your staring face.

You did not move.
Your eyes did not shift to catch his demons glaring
from flared nostrils,
tendons bunched into cords,
crazed hair crackling with the static
of rage.

That door was hollow inside,
a thinly veiled fortress
of splinters
and air.

I knew my bones would make the same noise
should they mutiny,
call me out in the silence,
all agree to snap
without warning.

I tried so hard that night
to be a flower on the wall,
forever blowing in an unfelt breeze,
perpetually bent
in surrender
on tiny,
broken stalks.

It is a memory lived
in photographs,
the color ungluing,
sending out feelers to grasp
at every tender organ
I carry. 

Some kind of magic happens,
and I can see there,
through Kodak eyes,
our first house
on Bettie Street.

The paneling is dark, rich with the air
we breathe.
The yellow linoleum shifts gently
beneath your feet.
The hand-me-down tables and chairs
your in-laws gave us,
the 70s brown floral curtains,
the beige tweed couch,
even the white rotary telephone
with its infant-gummed cord
on the side table
next to the green office chair.

All the objects in this room
have gathered here
as witnesses.

I watch from behind the bars
of my crib,
big brown Nicodemus bear sits next to me,
as he always did then,
for comfort.

I am big eyed in a small body.
I know the sound
of my mother’s voice
as I know the tiny moth-winged beating
of my own fluttering heart.

I know you are singing
for me. 

You are so young,
eleven years younger than I am now,
and I cannot imagine
the heavy, fizzy light of holding a baby
in your arms,
of giving her a name,
of calling her daughter.

You are big eyed, too,
curly brown hair falling down your back,
rising up over your ears,
unruly as the wind against the windows.

You are wearing a white t-shirt,
pulled down to the thighs,
pale legs graceful in the living room
as the song begins,
rising from your throat softly,
not like the sun,
but like the moon,
and heirloom voyeurs watch
from dusty corners,
the echoes of generations.

Anne Murray is in your head,
playing like an old record.
And you sing to me,
gather me to you,
so that I feel the words
as well as hear them,
like a pebble thrown
into a pool,
spreading ripples of sound
from your chest
into mine,
our hearts remembering
they are of the same great drum.  

You even went so far
as to write the lyrics
for me to read when I was older
in the book of memories
you kept for me
when I was a newborn,
the refrain of that song
a pillar of love
inside me:

You needed me.
You needed me.

And that house breathed around us,
as you danced with me in your arms,
past the deep brown cabinets in the kitchen,
the back door slightly open
to the brilliant green
of summer,
baby skin on mama cheek.

You wept the tears of love
only a mother can weep,
the tears of wounds closing,
their salt spilled,
dropped to the floor.

This did not go
unnoticed.

That house
and everything in it
watched
and wept
and sang, too,
in its own way.

It told me without speaking
the secret I know
now that I am grown,
now that I can simply look
upon a picture of you,
so young, pigtails tied at the ears,
long white legs and big green eyes,
a baby in your arms,
her tiny, toothless mouth open
in an unending vowel of joy
never to be matched
by anything else
in this life:

You needed me.
You needed me.

She has her own way,
an architecture of hearing
without listening.

She is a picture frame
with nothing inside it.

She is a dingy pallet
of muted color.

She knows the names
of many things,
but cannot taste
the ache of their beauty.

She never swims
without a life jacket.

She calls herself an artist,
but we know better.

To look upon her
is to look into the mirage
of a well, dry and waiting
for rain to fill it.

She is a gurgling stream,
swift and shallow,
concealing her true depth
with garrulous distraction.

She is a wall,
blank,
white as the crisp pages
of her leather-bound journal.

And she does not know
the tangle of snakes
we sleep in each night,
the slithering darkness that takes us captive.

She does not know how deep we go,
belly up and drowning,
no light to break the surface,
all hope given up
for dead.

She does not see how we rise from our graves,
night after night,
sifting the soil of our burial,
picking the glass from the mud,
building a window piece by piece
to look out from the rubble we share
with God
and all His stricken.

She wants it to be easy,
to slide into place like the clicking
of pre-fabricated pieces.
To name and label.
To sort into boxes.
To put onto shelves.
To gather dust.

To forget.

She does not know
art is an untamed creature,
built with fangs for tearing,
strong legs for running,
eyes that pierce concrete,
eyes that burn down the world.

She swishes her tail,
paws at the carpet,
howls at the moon
with a far-flung bleat.

She is but a sheep
among wolves,
clean,
and safe
and docile.

The hum of cities in the south.
The fast-feet scurry of walkways.
The teem of luxury sparkling high
in a garish phallic mirror rising
like an unholy spire.

A black man in tattered clothes stoops
over a wastebasket on the corner
of Carnegie Way and Spring Street,
digs out a wrinkled bag of potato chips,
savors the crumbs that someone else thought
weren’t worth the trouble
or the mess
of eating.

He falls in behind us as we walk,
and I find myself looking
over my shoulder,
feel my body coiling
into readiness.
Just in case.
Just in case.

I am ashamed.

There is blood on the concrete here,
It is planted deep as rebar in the sidewalk
to grow the restlessness of ghosts
beneath us.

The thick, wet heat of Atlanta bears witness
to the crushing of bones that built this place,
the great burning swath that stretched
to the sea.

Every city has its judge,
its jury,
its executioner.

I stand at a window on the seventh floor,
watch the bulge and stretch of commerce,
a fleshy neck of veins
nosing its way into the clapboard ribcages
of scarecrows who used to be people,
all used up now,
discarded like skeletons stripped
of their meat,
littering the alleys
like empty paper bags.

I am ashamed. 

I watch the fleeing rats of a finance meeting
spill out into the street,
ignore the outstretch of hungry hands,
wave down taxis,
drive away in cars with ornaments
adorning the hoods.

I am ashamed.

I wonder if they know they are as cheap
as the symbols they carry
with such necrotic pride.

I wonder if they know the secret cost
that no one speaks of here.

It is painted on the bare feet of children,
the faces of fathers mired in drink,
mothers who have carted hotel linens to the laundry
every morning of their lives
for the past 40 years,
just to buy a little more time here,
among these people
who would just as soon walk on them
than pull them to their feet.

None of us built this colossus.
We only crawl its stone brow
like trundling ants
seeking a visage
of innocence
among the guilty.  

They are the sway of captured bodies
beneath the ache of burned bones.

They are soft flesh
finally torn from muscle.

Finally free.

But they won’t know how
to claim lungfuls of air as their own,
how to stare boldly ahead
without the shield of slatted fingers spread
like trembling blinders.

They will not remember what it is
to lie down in safety,
to sleep without shackles,
to wake up whole.

They will need help in forgetting
the death grip of hiding
and how it crushed the voices
from their throats.

They will need help in plunging deep
into their own swirling rivers,
and returning with all the treasures they buried deep in the soft peat
so long ago.

They will need help in remembering
that they are not ghosts of a past life,
not shadows of sunken eyes and sallow cheeks,
but found.
As a holy grail is found.
As hope is found,
beaten but healing;
wingless, but alive.

We must help them to remember
that they are not the dark of basements,
not unkept corners of weeping and waiting,
but wide and unfurled,
stretching long
and open
and free.

We must tell them
they are a footpath
to every destination they have dreamed of.

They are no longer among the lost.

They are the road home.