Persistence

White paint splattered across a canvas
of high grass, clusters of daisies
glow at dusk, their infinite bright faces
like galaxies of fat stars
punctuated by buttercups—
pools of semicolons and ellipses.

The field’s flowers become light spilled
and scattered amongst impenetrable layers
and shades of green—bushes and trees climbing
the hill behind a yellow house, gathering
strength in late May beneath a Technicolor
Magritte evening sky. Under the front porch light,

on the stoop’s stage, a moth drags heavy,
cream-colored wings of tissue
striped with the palest pink
along a notebook’s edge, oblivious
to the poem being written around it.
In spite of it. Suddenly about it. Claws

along the horizontal ladder of metal
spiral and all three edges of thin paper
then follows the faint blue tracks
of black script. Climbs onto the pen
that is writing it. Traces
the pen’s length then paces. Declines

to the poem again, circles a stanza
before abandoning the poem
altogether and settling on the copper
beer mug, orange body folding
beneath draping wings like a miniature aircraft
parked without fanfare.

The world does not ask us to write it
or paint it. We persist, century
after century, asking pigment
and syllable to bring us closer
to the world’s body, like a lover
longing to describe the beloved.

We work the oil to remember
how the field sways, seducing
us to enter. We unwind the line
to catch the moth that is already gone.

Her Words

Silent, the girl holds a pale blue cigar box.
She stands in thick dusk, both hands holding
the closed coffin at heart level, ready,
offering it to the ground. It has been lightly raining
on and off for days. Early May, layers of yellow-green
lighten the quick, darkening air.
That small body was still soft when she found him,
pliable when she gently folded him into a torn, white t-shirt—
the innocent out of pain.
This ground does not resist the shovel.
Yet, digging still takes longer
than I want it to take, for the longer we wait
the more we’ll remember.
She hands me the box
covered with her words
written with marker. I should
bend down, offer
the dead to damp earth
but I hesitate, trying to read my daughter’s words.
While her body has bloomed overnight,
her voice has grown rare, painfully
rare. Too dark, I struggle to decipher
the shapes her fingers worked
to form, feeling like I’m reading
someone else’s love
letter. My gaze lingers too long on her writing,
as if I could read my daughter’s heart—this lovely stranger
I raised, this child, this woman who has become,
is becoming, was—the minute she was born, is—the moment,
in the moment, a force that cannot be contained yet must
be, even as she longs for what she hates.
The box’s blue cardboard
lifts her letters away from its surface, makes
them hover, luminescent. After one line
I stop reading. Suddenly, what matters
is that she wrote
across the entire face of the box. Her hand
kept moving. She said it.
Her words glowing in my hands,
I stoop and give them
to the grave. The sound
of dirt hitting
a coffin of any kind
sounds the same.
As my right arm embraces her,
she leans into me.