Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Before the Fire

• 139 before the Fire “What am I going to do, Mama? You’ve been my husband.” “Yes. And you’ve been my wife.” —auGuSt 14, 1998 I’m bent over her before the oven door of the Lower Umpqua Crematory the first time since infancy I am without veils to her She without the mask nursing me I am talking to her I am not stopping my mouth all over the flesh of her face, big Lumbee Cherokee cheekbones we first came to in America, her sand dunes we hated the body I am telling her it’s okay it won’t hurt I am telling her how great she is how beautiful I am smoothing her skin (I was always afraid to touch the most beautiful face, her eyes • 140 are the bluest skyblue again and her smile is of ecstasy the wisest bliss her fingers curl before her mouth delicately (did he smooth her face in the moments I let her go? the agony on her face when we carried her out, lightest birdbone into the bright sun Or has she become the ecstasy of death she so believed and wanted us to believe in? now most heavy dead weight doll I’m murmuring to the lover on the pillow beside me murmuring in her ear like I’m waking to the hungry baby finally now forever outside me (I followed in her Buick behind the mortician’s van the fifty miles north up the coast, she wrapped in her yellow rose sheet and his maroon rug on the floor in the back, my father’s ashes in the walnut urn beside me. Up through midsummer Oregon Coast traffic. (All my life I’ve longed to see through walls but I never dreamed you were in that passing truck.) “Like the old tradition of the procession,” he delighted though only our two vehicles. • 141 “Your father wanted to be cremated,” she said again last week. “I never wanted that until he did. For our ashes to be put together and spread over the hills of Ramona. Finally I wanted what he wanted.” I see the red bricks “just like a barbecue oven,” he warned. I see the bricklayers stacking them, the temperatures set. He’s given me the instructions, has left us alone. “Take your time.” All is in waiting for me to slide her into his “Cosmic Blue” All engraved in the tile wreath above the door. My tongue on her face could be a poem about learning to talk, she taught me to talk could be a poem about learning to read, she a great poem about learning to write this is a poem about words breath of wind blowing up through the body, cherokee wind to my mouth on her nipples all my first year about learning to write the love on the pillow beside you without reservations without infidelity like letting the milk down to the baby babbling the milk back to her mouth to write the trail of tears out of the caves • 142 (all my life I’ve longed for this coast line I still cannot write all this year in the bath with her to form words with the breathing out of the cavity of my heart and stomach “her soft southern drawl” to her most astonishing face, Milky Way star above her eyes skyblue again not the iron that was in them when she drilled into me again that last minute her Third Eye she always warned she had laid out like a dead bird, all the roadkill we passed though soul still coming through the smile of her ecstasy I was born to grieve for you, Mama, what you couldn’t do I was born to be your greatest lover to write your story I became your wife to be the husband faithful to you ...