As Mourning Doves Persist

  The admonishment at age 6 was this:  Pull your lower lip in, or an elephant  will come along and step on it .  My grandmother of the always clean,  passing the felt-bottomed collection plate, allowed no pout.  Sadness was for others with less, without silverware to eat. No picking at the peas or potatoes. My lip and lump    in my throat forbidden, hidden. Stick figures  populating a children’s book. Spine affixed with silver adhesive tape, a stringy makeshift mend, once belonging to my father, her most obedient son (Just swallow that ball of  irritable.  Good Manners Can Be Fun ) I defaced the aging pages,  scribbling my crooked name sloppily in pencil, and then rooted  for the tiny pachyderm in a blue star-less room   Nose-trunk growing like Pinocchio caught in what he wanted  to believe. That he was a real boy. That these elongated faces  make visible sense when we are lonely and no one is listening. When the forest is full of wonderful screeching monkeys and rhinoceros.  Thick ski

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the frame down to contain what we came to hear I have applied lipstick

For she who hatches swatches of what she sees. Snaps through a window  faster than her cat in crouch. For she who measures the trees from the top  down with a lens. Hatchback, glass track. Saturday’s tables captured.    For with her we will learn the bird talk, the staged songs, switch backs and sidelong glances. For she can organize a bench of twigs on which to sit. An easy  hors d’oeuvre  p arty at Marcy’s, mixing friends like fledglings    come to settle mid-exhaustion in an oval of feathered rest. Or watching  simply for what rolls across the road and comes to a stop. Nest atop.  Refreshing shadow in this summer heat. Soft pecking from inside.

What springs up: insistence in this persistent                                                 mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes     from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew   She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow     (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender)   (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present     (anyone’s mother)    aging    when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin                         captures the sunrise light like   anticipation’s shower      blood underneath all        humming bird or spores from her heart and in her mouth   inhale (frightened) breath     exhale grit inhale (certain) breath           exhale grit  

We are tethered to one another with invisible wires. I type the words into a flat screen, “I am relieved” in New Mexico   in my red chair and my sister in California receives them at her kitchen table overlooking redwood trees heavy with their separation someday from solid earth. We each hold a morning cup and relish the sip. I am sensing the past in scent and sensation more than I have before. And wonder if I passed through a tunnel or under a magical lamp post I have circled for 67 years. Now I own an old woman’s nose. First piqued sense is smell. A headiness that is potent but brief. I go back to it throughout the day like a diary left open on the bedside table. Sun hits puddled water. Water spills from table to concrete. Runoff trickles toward the base of tree. I am a child in a wading pool again. In a bucket are prickly weeds that my husband pulled. An age-old slime replicates on the surface, resembles algae along the perimeter of an inland river. My father, fly fisherman, exhibit

Today I barely pick up my slipper feet but amble outside. My cupped hands suggest holler clear across to ridge where cars on the farthest ribbon float like toys or tin angels.  A fence runs its length in front of me, pocked with afterthoughts —                                                 niches carved in the wall.                          Four separate fist indents.  I ache for treasure.              A locket to bear a tender face.   Above my lazy vacation sightline, hunchback mountain  shadowing me since girlhood  with pastels so somber, any licked thumb                                      could smudge.  As if pools of wilting golden leaves,                          an ache in the ancient divets. One dog howls  and then, a country rooster, satisfied. Here where  Saturday is but half started, a metal  fleur de lis  leans against dry muddy.   Land swoops up from mid-horizon and one house pins down  the crest of creosote wave. I imagine  shelf contents in the wall where there are no