As Mourning Doves Persist

  When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that    rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember    the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside   to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified   protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat  - what I believe tadpoles   beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek   the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father   who may never button up his favorite green shirt again  with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk    out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife  and we either joke or pretend we will take him   to the beach when we arrive and that we must bring him a panorama, one gulp of   a photograph of his ten

  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