The Silver Locket, and: The Diamond Dog, and: The Green of Oxygen

The Silver Locket

On the hillside where goats threaded their waythrough rocks, theirbells making the sounds of rattlingkeys, she awoke with a silver locket.Inside this silver dollop was the face of a Greek marinerwho loved her. Ragsleft from the wedding so many years ago,before her enchantment, hungaround her waist. A scrapof dancing shoe embracedher foot.

           She couldn'tremember why they said the stars turned in crystal spheresor that fire was invisible, but she dancedin cream satin shoes, she remembered;and my little black shoes were gleaming crow feathers,or the noses of seals, or jet, or onyx lamps filled with oil,the kind Aladdin found.

After the library at Alexandria was torched, there wereeight centuries of brindled flocks.

She, who was my mother and told me this story,     as I sat by the smudge-leafed orange groves     and watched black and gold spiders make webs,had come through a portal,a cone,and thus awakenedwith only the silver locket.

The rosebush was part of the story, and theDiamond Dog who ran through theyard one evening at dusk. Readingof Queen Anne's Lace, she told meI was a princess.The locket held a picture of myfather, an Argonaut sailor,when centuries were just buttons of pearl,and time hung around her necklike this silver locket.

The Diamond Dog

He hasn't jumped yet; his square-cutbody like a calving glacierhasn't glitter-struck you, hasn'trevealed its malachite striations,its contradictions oftransparency.Once I walkedon the Mendenhall Glacier, or maybeI dreamt it? Fear clothed me—rubber boots, yellow slicker, over

wool hooded sweatshirt, allmade of fear's cloth, as I lookeddown into the water, fathomless asmy anger about the past, water I had tostep over, from the boatto glacier shelf.

Little Dog, you were not there, or I could havestepped on your back naked,shedding the clothes of trepidation.I could have ridden you, Diamond Dog—over, past, and away—leaving behind all the blameand regret of betrayals,the house in the orange grove, the ash heapfrom which we both came.

The Green of Oxygen

Our galaxy, like many others, is a beautiful spiral, encrusted with gemlike star-forming regions that glow with the red of hydrogen or the green of oxygen spewed out from many dying stars.

—The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams

"It was silver," she said, "liquid,coiling through the trees."

     "What about the green?" I asked, "Oaks,     sycamores, horse chestnut, poplar?"

But I never heard her voice again,itself a tuning fork,itself silver and sounding "A."

My mother, who planted the barely aliverosebush, lived etchedby palm fronds from the old date trees,under which the Diamond Dog ran.Her silences I have inherited,along with invisible emeralds, the greenof oxygen and my own voice,                           a spiraling galaxy.