As Mourning Doves Persist

I pull my metal chair up to this glass table with my morning cup and unshakeable sadness. The violets in their plastic pottery spread and droop, withered heads of blood and rust curled in on themselves, ready for burial like composting beautiful, spent fruit. A single silver strand arches and shines beside me on the porch. No visible web, only this simple sturdy thread, tiny rope from which the morning spider must have propelled itself. Or perhaps its construction was made in the night and abandoned with day. Tiny bowl of orange, body mostly belly, skittering into hiding when the humans wake.  Here a burst of sage burns in a shell atop a red shawl spread on the city’s plaza. Priests and politicians on the bandstand.   Around the city perimeter, native yucca sends up its tall, protective spikes. Century plant’s tightened coil unbraids itself, surrenders shoots nearly drained of color now. The opposite of surrender: fists exploding. At the scene of the shooting, we ar...

To select a favorite stone to set in silver is to know your knuckles and the years of cobalt and opal      you have held your hands under cool water, inside this wintery place. The songs you know by heart, melodies of movie musicals in which the angel father brings a star of cyan from blue heaven for his daughter The full, blue moon, your head bobbing to jazz drum shuffle All this aquamarine and fall blue, late snow that lands on the azure underside of desert earth where aspens molt and the evergreen trees are nearly navy when squinting to see driving in again for home, from far. Tired and blue Blue where rickety houses hang on to the edge of the earth Secure now as seen from a deep denim galaxy, you, working blue, Mother, and I had to leave you to return to your enchanted place To your worn, cool hands jeweled with blue. To dry waves of juniper, jays, and the hues of landscape as runoff spills over, blue bottles......

Cream colored telephone in its nicho . Dial tone. Rotary rolling back on itself. Hallway emptied save for the  sweep of mother  i n a wide skirt, handling Marlboros, sparking friends who listen.  Tentative between errands.  Bell that bounces back when knocked to the floor.  Sturdy stationary  cord that kinks up on itself.  More babies born.  Congratulatory calls.  Plugged into the wall,  traveling only so far.  Conduit to grandparents.  Man on the other end,  better than a tin can.  Late for dinner.  Frayed frequency.  Magic string,  superior to yoyo.  Trick to convey whispers. Last minute. Grocery list additions. No other nook but this one. Hard plastic cradle cupped to the ear. Alphabet of neighbors behind walls. Hand folded notes with five numbers. Morse code of fingernails Secrets and children’s temperatures.  Snow days and best friends. Tablets dog e...

           Banjos in the cafe. Garlic in the day's first bite.  Book on my table with only  one chapter left  to savor,  but I draw out  every last  swallow.       To photograph the room is to both shrink  and freeze the chaotic overlaps of Sunday time.  Two men seated beside me imagine aloud together,  hardly touching their food. Potatoes, avocados, single blueberry  scone.      I rol l back the foil to taste.  Fork and knife are of no use.  All fingers on the keyboard. Throat singing. Spoken word. A heart of foam on the surface of  my cup.

What does it take to clear a space where once slept a teen daughter. Her discarded tidbits still here.  Mismatched  pencils,  erasers hardened. I hear the scratch of tree limbs she told as a girl woke her at night. I sit now in this room I’m claiming for study. She could come back and claim her green felt frog, book marks, her stolen designer sunglasses resting in hard cases. Her discarded eye shadow and stubs of sage. Silver pinkie rings she took off and bottles of tincture, Singer's Saving Grace. (She's only a seven hour drive away.) I’ve scraped the stick ‘um from the closet doors, emptied the small red rolling cart of Screaming Yellow Zonkers and licorice whips. A clean slate.  A cleared place for mother writer  A narrow  stage A margin A rural  wooden  table to take and name.