An Unbinding

When you find yourself peering through the glass

at a colony of bobbing seahorses,

stop.

marvel at the mythical, royal gaze from each venerable face

the tiny bones stacked behind plates and skin

as thin as bat wings

the prehistoric tails that coil stiffly around the tank’s plastic sea grass

or around each other

 in lovely symmetry

Like the way we ground ourselves through unconscious gestures

weave all of our fingers into a single fist

as we window shop after a satisfying meal

or absentmindedly slide our hand across a lower back

at a party on the way to the bathroom

as if to say, I’m still here.

A child’s legs bound securely around the waist

of the person he most trusts to do the carrying.

One sleeping body tucked in the curved spaces of another

the breath of trust and ownership, moist on the neck.

Even our jackets hanging heavy on the back of our chair

to say, this is mine.

In storms

they are thrown by the roiled sea

from the thing they were clinging to

and die from the exertion,

tossed like white clattering shells onto the shore

I drank a black pint of porter

slowly and alone last night

in a town that doesn’t know me

and I didn’t know what time it was

but I suspect the kids were just then being folded

under their heavy quilts

gripped in the curl of their father’s thick fingers

There are no storms in the aquarium,

so just watch.

There is always one reckless explorer

whose small fin flutters wildly

as she frees herself from her anchors

and takes a ride in the aquarium’s artificial current

A Contest

I went out this morning

with the teeth of my rake

to wrestle a bit with the dormant earth.

I don’t know who won.

Certainly the pokeweed

her massive root, a living, wet vegetable

clung for her life

while the dry grasses of last summer’s weed

rolled easily into bales

right out of the garden gate

and seemed relieved to be done with the covering.

And most assuredly

The pungent humus

exhumed

let out a silent exhale

and shuddered proudly in the rawness

at the top of the pile.

Surely my arms,

burning at the shoulder

or heart

finding equanimity in the tussle and scrape

were no worse or better than the roots that crackled

with each rip

There was no anger on either of our part,

no real competition to speak of

and of reverence

I can only prostrate down so low before I am buried beneath it.

My Mother is Not a Character

Your mother

breezes down the stairs

quips that she cannot join us for pot pies

because she would have to put on underwear

a thing my mother would never say.

At sixteen

after a sensible family dinner,

I drove to my friend's townhouse

where she and her mother would be found

folded up on a patio chairs

dining on chocolate and cigarettes

the wild instability of which

I would breathe in with hungry drags

Lizzy’s mom kept cereal in the oven

had a untamed kitchen drawer

that would flop off its tracks

clumsily revealing its contents,

the most interesting to our eleven-year-old

criminal minds

were the loose Benson & Hedges strewn among the

rubber bands and packs of playing cards.

My mother’s drawers would not flop

had tidy compartments

a spot for the Chapstick

scissors labeled MOM’S

My boyfriend’s mother,

only fifteen years older than her son,

asked us how our sex was going

one day over brunch

said the words blow job

as I attempted to steadily chew my eggs

She was fantastic

I never got to wear that child’s flush of mortification

the discomfited rolling of eyes

never dug up the nude photos and loose joints

we found in the nightstand at Heather’s house.

Never argued over politics or religion or my

declarations at the table that meat, suddenly, was murder.

Never heard the confusing muffled moans

in the middle of the night

or had anything to add when morose friends showed cut marks

and called their moms bitches.

My mother is not a character

she is cool hands on a fevered forehead

fresh, ironed sheets

reading in the shade instead of rolling in the waves

dinner at six o’clock

hand sewn costumes on Halloween

merengue cakes ringed with exotic fruit

In the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show

I watched naked blonde children

spill out of an old van

and envied their little, unkempt lives

a puppy on a rope chewing at the fleas in its toes

they have no bedtimes, I considered.

A fact their therapists must now find intensely interesting.

An Infestation

It must mean something,

these three inchworms materializing

just as we talk about  the shifts under your feet

ducking between the brambles of

oh what should I do?

and these little lime bodies

so translucent and sweet

like the uncurling sprouts from the damp soil mounds

waving little messages on my shoulders

hanging from the tips of my hair

while you wait for what I think

I believe in something I need not specify

as they bend and unbend their nymph forms like a nod

The next day the mailbox is sealed in their webbing

they dangle from the dogwoods, swaying like lanterns

the kids trap them in jars

we are dusting them from our clothes

picking them off each others’ backs

these cankerworms

biting holes in the brand new petals

spinning through some cycle of their own

but even as novelty gives way to nuisance

there is surely still an answer

in their sticky, hatching abundance.

The Cards

Antelope said

the lesson is do

yet she looked at me, horns down

and that reads more like this:

but first I will need a notebook,

small and spiral-bound with an arty, smart-looking cover

and naturally I should wait until the baby grows

at which point I can order a book

about doing

so that there’s no risk of doing it wrong

And already I see her white rump of warning disappear

into the foliage,

because these are not doings

These are the work of bear

finding golden sweetness in the hollow of an old tree

curling under layers of bark

digesting all that the thorny world has painted up to this point

until the first, tight buds coax him out

blinking against the white

when he will rumble to the surface

holding the answer in his hungry paw.