As Mourning Doves Persist

                                   In the back lot is a broad-shouldered truck father to a sleeker figure with fins You have graduated to walking                         (or sailing an electric model with no sound) but the workhorse of your boyhood is patient                         longing parade watchers recall                         the boulevard (though small) of the quarterback, the professor, and the lifeguard Your ears showed then and the cleft in your chin yet it’s the softness in your eyes, headlights, ...

as we walked the nightmare streets, cold thoughts wrapped in wool scarves scratching against the hard words. You step off the edge, nearly falling. I wouldn’t catch you, even if I tried  tonight, nursing wounds. Piercing dog cries paw at the heels of things I should not have said... (excerpted from the longer poem) found in The Shape of Caught Water http://redmountainpress.us/ or directly from the author (covelli@cybermesa.com)

Dry air sucks me toward the stark pines in concert on the mountain, silhouettes of women re-assemblng. I love  this brown place where flashes  of strata show flesh  centuries  of bark and moon. I drink this place like hard water.     I navigate an older childhood of alcohol and noises  behind adobe walls. I climb crumbling brown earth and love what others discard. We assemble  as slim vials     assemble  as stories.  I  drive the whimsy map of maternal pines with tiny nuts  to bite down on. This gritty ride is  nearly  angelic. Assemblage. My hand on the steering wheel,  a learned behavior. I saunter   in exodus, dressed all in gray with flames of Fall breaking from mottled cottonwood. Enchantment the given  adjective. Brown and lavender hues like birds that punctuate the night. Book splayed on the passenger seat beside me.  M ud clarified with...

...each sister paints her from memory. Hands in the paint, dressing in the drain. We catalogue the recipes and hangs them from limbs One pentimento canvas after another; the maternal body like tree bark layered with ribbons of broth. A perfect dumpling moon rises like the edible parts of our family addictions - a mother’s proud dimples before thinning whisked into soup and shushed into night burl where her weathered feet wither and rest silent night ferns folding back onto themselves on the forest floor. We eat her body whole for the holiday lick the bones clean with our salt lick tears pour her ashes into a honeycomb jar.

...Letters to the dead fall behind headboards when weeping overcomes us, sweeping, are lifted free, clearing away pennies and spoons –   leftover utensils, touchstones for the woman whose withholding husband can no longer hear her, sharp pen on parchment. The cheek, when caressed, remembers shorthand,             insertion of a comma to catch             overdue breath. The dead answering             when we least expect. Their whispers arrive as instruction – return to sender – I adore you. We remember salty, sweet, adhesive stamps against our rough tongues; with trust,             we open the metal mouth,             drop the envelo...

                                                                 I sit on the porch out of doors blue heeler beside me in the sun her dusty back rises and falls in far-off dream pant. From the nest she dug earlier, flecks of walnut bark stick to her coat, dull sequins and webbing. My hands make small, idle sweeps across the warm fur. A lone car travels up a side street. Pup’s lazy head periscopes to the sound. Inside, my husband half watches a movie, mutters to himself, soundtrack lonely and calling. Our daughter busy, texts quiet calls, fingers like a modern telegraph operator. It’s Saturday and I have everything and nothing to do. The silence in the yard, punctuated with breeze, lulls me to paralysis at the ankles and full, low-slung gaze. Our bodies bo...