Still my mother combs her long black hair,
but there is no water, no consolation of salt.
By coal glow and cricket song, the wolf steps,
obscures the moon. My mother's face appears
a mask of anger where the birds sleep.
Over the violin night she scrapes
her hair, a white belly stretched over sand.
Over the coals, the black bony plates.
A lizard's shell erupts, white flesh into flame.
The heat on my belly is good. I lie on my side
near the fire's burning, near each cinder's glow.
More cracks in the rock, and the desert forgets
the sea voices, the creatures drowned in stone--
a black extinction, a faint remembrance of tides.
My mother's eyes, once young, have turned to sand,
brushed by wind where the moon begins to hum
a song of blood, the night's cold and shadowed rest.
Her breasts hang heavy as stone. I pray waters,
but nothing disturbs this slumber nor parts
the white hairs of night. Each rail is buried,
each train has gone. Only maps attest to elsewhere--
a grove of live birds ever away.
Here, a chair, a country where nothing grows
and death lasts for days.
Here, a residue of sky and sand, a flame's mirage.
My mother's hands begin their slow hush.
Still she sings her hair to sleep over my crib,
still the birds in the belly swell violins at dawn.
I close my eyes and dream a sea of voices,
dream mirrors turned upward from the root.
It is here I begin to drown--
a ripple of sky where I enter,
a small patch of night where the rains descend.
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
areudirty
dailybridgerton
