Friday, July 15
BE SMALL
You can too pin down a wave
with a barrette.
My mother’s fingers
worming through my hair,
fixing me up for a picture.
The haystack in the needle’s eye
is a rock in Oregon. Look
into the light sliver:
See the seagulls, the barnacles?
There, the brunette
with the bones?
That is my mother.
I have her tomato—
it is a pincushion.
The possessions of the dead
are talismans, no matter
how common. Common
as lovers shrugging
love is a letting go.
Why do they speak
like hospice chaplains?
Common as migraines.
If you trespass that buzzing
auric hurt, the fluorescent
lights that harden hospital
corridors against tailing
ponies, please hush.
If it’s love, leave me,
then, in gentleness.
If it’s love, be smaller
than the scene inside
the sugar egg I dropped
at Emmanuel Preschool
show & tell. If truly
time is collapsed into one
seamless acorn,
they take their tea to this day,
the mother rabbit in calico
& her straight-eared, pinafored
babies viewable through
a pink-frosted
cottage window.
And me, inconsolable,
and my mother consoling me
that people are so much more
important than things.
If so, someone take
this vegetal fruit from me—
is it stuffed with lead? Perhaps
if we loosen the green ribbon,
as in the Victorian
ghost story, it will fall
with a neat little thud and roll
to someone else’s feet.
(Constance Hansen)