Mother

Here she is again, standing inthe winter yard, a frenzy of dark

wings around her, the tin platesof peanuts and meat scraps

set before her, the frozen creekwatching with its glass eye.

Come summer I will studythe patience of the muddy river,

will make a prayer of the bonesof the earth, the congealing green skin

of the shallows in dead summer.But for now there is only the banked

prayer of a snowdrift, the dusksun with its blood-red entrails.

The cold days are opening and closingtheir insect eyes, and everywhere is

a fluttering of wings. And what ofthe black obelisks of the arriving crows,

a sewn-shut sky that will give waysoon to an optic nerve of moon,

to the feathers catching and clingingin dreams to my mother’s hair?