Fata Morgana: Poems

For My Mother in Lieu of Mourning

For My Mother in Lieu of Mourning It takes a thing so long to be true. I don’t want my dead back, not any more, dreaming they’re just in hiding. The body stiffens into I’m awake, chilled by a window left open all night. Dust grays the screen, truncates the run-down view of strip mall loading dock and idling delivery truck fumes: unseasonable cold, no birds, everything gets dirty fast. Then memory becomes rain after days of overcast, wet panes blur into blind clouds learning to let go. Too accurate a memory is the cure for dreams. Your body of brackish water, black, opaque, impossible to see through to the bottom, swim across to shore: I’ve been drowning in my sleep too long, when will I stop comparing you? Today my hands discover distance, the heart I imagined I had: this lying signifier settled from time to time by ghosts. The words return in single file, repeat themselves: cold and uninhabited, my heart’s healed over under ice. Would you have frozen in these lines? You were their possibility: now love must find another shape. You left me here with what you saved me from, and I am equal to that: absence, wind tangled in a winter tree, defeat dangling from stripped branches, or perhaps it’s just a plastic grocery bag. 11 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 11 ...