Remembering Our Mothers, and: The Call Will Come, and: Our Lady of Lizards

Remembering Our Mothers, and: The Call Will Come, and: Our Lady of Lizards

Remembering Our Mothers

for Alison

This morning tore me through the gauzy nets of dream
into too many ragged rhythms,
and my breath, my dear,
is one of them. So I'm reading
your poem to help me breathe.

It's the one where you are watching
two deer women—a mother and a daughter—
in the moon bath of your awed breath.
And I want to tame my breath
to watch them with you.

Instead, I'm back on the logging road
we huffed and puffed our way up
that first hot afternoon in Oregon:
a doe tiptoes across the path before us,
paying us the compliment
of ignoring our incursion, or
is it a gesture of forgiveness?

I know we both are coveting this omen,
as though we have been shopping
the whole afternoon long and finally
come upon the perfect sundress—
some fawn-spotted sheath to slip
over our bodies and change us
into silk-skinned women of the forest.
But, alas, only one of us can have it.

Except that the green curtain
behind the doe reopens
the next instant to admit her sister.
And we see there is no limit
to the wild's largesse and that
her changing rooms are always open.

The Call Will Come

On a cobalt blue morning like this one
while you are sitting at your desk
thinking, for a moment, about something other
than your mother's panicked wheezing.

It will come while you are watching
goldfinches pecking at the plastic tube
hanging like an IV bag over your herb garden.

While you are thinking that it's well past time
to cut down the bee balm that has shed,
while you weren't looking, its red petals.

Noticing that the finches are losing all their yellow.
Soon you won't know them from the sparrows.
Trying to recall if it always comes so early.

And suddenly feeling that flutter
in your throat when you remember
you didn't say goodbye to the last robin.

Our Lady of Lizards

Too many talents—from tennis to drawing—
too much intelligence to waste—
yet my niece can't seem to focus
on a subject, let alone settle on a major.
At twenty-one, she lives at home,
goes to school, and takes care of her gecko.

She's not always the sweetest to her boyfriend,
who treats her like the Queen of Heaven,
but her lizard, who does nothing
to deserve devotion, she loves
with microscopic attention,
reading up on gecko care, helping him molt.
For if the skin that thins and crackles
doesn't all flake off, the poor guy
could get sick, even die.

So she takes out her eyebrow tweezers
and gets the spots he misses, leaving us
to wonder how geckos ever survived
before human hands entered their lives.
Eventually, her love evolves
to include all lizards, and pretty soon
she's frequenting the pet store
more often than most of her classes.

At some point, no doubt, one of us
will get out our tweezers, suggest
she transform this newfound passion
into a major in Life Sciences.
And she will do her best to skitter
from our hands like the chameleon
my sister and I found on her fireplace
screen and tried to help outside,
who bit my sister's finger for her trouble.

Today my niece comes home crying
from the pet store. In the latest shipment
are several lizards whose heads are outgrowing
their bodies—a sure sign of malnutrition.
When they get like that,
she knows they must be hand fed.
She offers to take home the most deformed
and try to save them. If you want a lizard,
says the owner, you can pay me $30.
Otherwise, you can get out of my store.

There's one whose grotesque head
will...