As Mourning Doves Persist

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

ran into things  His equilibrium subject to the heat and pressure deep    in the earth between crust and core –   and then he dropped  into a Snow White sleep Many fretted the potential shearing off of  his historical edges – but then he woke   his vision once burnt revived  expanded –   diamond tough to make a kaleidoscope catalogue now of his eyes   chronology of roots and flowering trees   Heavenly names that came before to pollinate reveal the thin, scraped soft skin  the surface of catching up of blowing burst dandelion kisses   Tiredness relinquished     Garden dirt turning again in his receptive hands.

As if with a newborn again in the house I rise to guide my elderly mother after her surgery Slow slog from bed to bathroom, and back again  From muscle spasm to dropping  Her hands in resignation, skin pocked like aspen bark Just a few moments of balance brings night breeze  Three cautious steps in the dark before the pain ascends again Up from the tightened grip of her right foot all the way To cut buttock and wilting thigh after    Posterior replacement with titanium hip, and its cry  Unrelenting bedfellow we did not anticipate Her groggy arthritic former piano playing hands    Flutter and press against the skin, as if ironing away grimace She wears a silver and turquoise wristwatch band which she Refuses to take off, measuring sleeplessness I attempt to smooth her taut face, respect spit and clench If she’s dreaming, it’s mumbled nightmare having returned  To temporary recline in a room of pillows and pull up bar   A window where a motion sensor flips on, detecting outside Movement

My husband leaves each weekday morning at seven. I hear the door to the laundry room open and close. Then sense a gremlin draft  from the adjacent vacated garage. The house goes quiet    for nearly nine hours. He rarely leaves a dirty dish in the sink though  lately  he hasn’t made up the queen-size bed entirely. One corner of  the sheets  pulled back like a welcoming tent flap. Returning, he stacks his most recent hardback library acquisitions  on the blonde end table next to his burgundy wingback chair,  and retrieves the same blue bowl nightly for a dinner salad   which he eats alone. Hungry earlier than I still typing. He walks the hallway with a minor tilt and two clenched fists as if  balanced oars.    This, a recently acquired mannerism. Together we are kitchen dwellers. Gritty lemon pepper granules and orange juice sans pulp. Eggs on the weekend. Subtitles on the television in a room where all that’s missing are TV trays.    My own paperback reads are in the bedroom on the beds

                         A car stops and the door opens                                               -   Linda Gregg, Bamboo and A Bird   A car stops and the door opens and sound  escapes. Splash that was not there before.  Into the air, jazzy brush on drum. Lullaby with rouged plum sky.  Snippet of guitar strum, winsome sonata.  Sound propels me to see all the cars parked  under the summer night’s street lights.  Cars with bodies inside sucking smoke and  reaching for one another.  From my vehicle determined closure  as my mother zips her weighty beige  purse shut. Dangling from her left hand.  A single tube of lipstick having fallen  onto the sidewalk alongside us. Its descriptive clink like dropping  a silver dollar into Sunday’s offering plate.  Or the joviality of my handsome  younger father on a Saturday night  tossing dice. Blowing on them first  over splayed game board, sounding  ha-cha .  Or is it simply the metallic  creak of the VW’s dented passenger  door releasing from th