As Mourning Doves Persist

One Dimension of Woman On Tuesday we lost poet, essayist and lecturer Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist She was 82. Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born that motherhood is but one physical dimension of a woman’s being. Rather than being defined as mothers, or by their status as childless, women should be defined in terms of themselves, as all humans should be. Nor should becoming a mother mean women are isolated and not allowed to participate in the social and professional world. Instead, Adrienne Rich calls for “a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.”

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. Mark Twain Last night I dreamt what I can only imagine sprung from the combination of my daughter reading to me from Huckleberry Finn, a little late night t.v. about housewives whose husbands have returned from rehab, are living with women not their wives, or have been shot, and a tai salad for dinner rich with garlic and coconut milk followed later with tater tots dipped in spicy buffalo wing sauce. See? Enough to make even Salvador Dali image above and beyond.  Initially, there was a backyard surgery to re-attach a man's ear. It seems a barnyard animal had bitten off the small appendage and it's questionable whether I should be allowed to join the surgery though I know I am entirely capable. Still, I realized halfway through assistance on same that I've failed to pack my daughter's lunch, and, running home, find that her father is just lifting her into the back of a truck which is d...

Punctuation on the wall  where the previous  blooms  clung. Blue looking at  what I've  just  said  to you.  Green is  the center of the bud yet to come.  Sky is the memory.  Vines  to revive. Tangle c rows and persistent doves.  Tangle of vines on the wall.  Punctuation previously   seen. The memory  come to bud  blue to the sky on the wall. You yet to come to hear  what I have just  said to you. Doves. Doves. 

Sculpture by Melissa Zink A man in the kitchen navigates a note to his daughter pressing his large fingers against the tiny, flat alphabet on my telephone. He is her father and this is a slow and unusual communication. He is learning to link as the children do, tapping the pint-size letters on a platen that hardly resembles a typewriter. There is a pound key to create space and an enter button that is a circle of silver to Send. Our daughter has driven all day, 11 and one half hours toward the Pacific Ocean, and having just arrived in San Diego, transmits us a beach sunset in one dimension while we, in New Mexico, prepare our dinner of sweet potatoes and chicken in the oven; snow outside falling in soft flakes like white Morse code that doesn’t stay on the ground very long, and the dog is confused when we open the French doors to let her out. She just stands there looking. The house is quieter without the teenager who by now would have roared ...

Here I am looking very much like my father, holding a picture of my daughter who looks remarkably like I looked when I was about her age, 15 or 16. Does that mean that she resembles her grandfather? I think, in fact, that I have palm-sized black and whites of my father's mother shot sometime in the 1920s and, coming across one of them once not too many years ago, I thought, huh, my daughter looks like her great grandmother, the mother of my father. Audrey was wearing a hat in the picture and her head was on a provocative tilt. Unusual because the grandmother (my daughter's great grandmother) that I knew, the one I'm thinking of was far from exotic looking in my mind growing up. In fact she epitomized the hard working White Anglo Saxon Protestant woman in an apron that covered her upper torso, waist and thighs, wearing funny looking glasses, and with her hands up to their wrist in soap suds... though, wait, that was like my grandfather, my father's father Mike, who ...

Once there was a living room hung with saints; now only lives etched onto my back, red and black. Blue Lady G and the scent of red roses. Blood of C, and metal hearts circled with sharp wire. I am chained to the bottles of ash on the mantle. At my ankles, brown paper sacks of holy sand. I am dragging the memory of my brother, crosses on the highway, shadow of his racing, erasing his son at four and forever smiling wife in profile. Tears tattooed here for the tiny butterfly, cut short flutter of my daughter come stillborn, and the initials of her mother so I'll never lose her. Wishes like shame engraved, as I am left standing for the annual replacement of plastic wreaths and red valentines, fading caution tape and glass. I am weeping with my back turned so you cannot see me. Nothing but small creases as I walk over nails on this dry desert. Pilgrimage of body art for the missing down my shoulder blades and spine. Head down with nothing more to drink. Absence...