Alone outside ain’t nil, but to be it
scares my mother so. I explain
to her what mountains mean
are crowds and staggering
Carolina Wrens, crows and stone walls
licked like moss wrung out at their heels.
If only the day’s door slid open
like the cap yawning in my hands, my
summit-hair slick-wet as the day I arrived
through my mother’s mingling blood,
where outside meant outhouse
meant a ravine brimmed with spiders
and midnight shits. I put away my pride
at my own chosen suffering, green
as a hard candy sucked into my jaw.
The house she was born in: bulldozed
by whites, and I’ve nerve to call this costly
valley holy. Snow like sawmill dust
sails down, and the ice shoves me
like a bad bully on a trip. I cling
to rope and rock, one tree copies
another: no words but whispers.
To have a piano in your house,
my mother always said, meant you was
A Somebody. Tuned or not she always
had one even if nothing else to chew on.
The wind won’t hide its oblivion arrow
and on the trail I lose one black
glove to frozen mud, trip over my own
spikes. What am I trying to heal up
this way, where any tree unredeemed
may haw and toss me down? To understanding
I come round late as a missed note,
flat as a month of Sundays, or so my mother says.
I believe in the small writ large, writ impossible
as an unlit canoe silvering beneath the Milky Way
scattered above this lake mirrorless as a gulp.
Look at me, this somebody choosing
to squat outside and piss from this earth
into the next and the next. What must
my mother think of such wealth.