My Mother in the Winter Zoo, and: Elegy for My Mother’s Mind, and: Psalm 23½, and: I Will Grow Old in My Bed, and: My History in Sand and Light

Six peacocks sit like fat jewels shining in a bare tree.It’s Christmas and snowing so hard,

flakes pile high on telephone wires. We’re nearlythe only ones here. You say you once came with your father

to see the oldest living cockatoo, before you knewhow soon he’d be gone. You never thought to ask him

who named you, or why at five you were dressedin your Sunday best to join him on his bus route

to transport German prisoners of war. You livein a habitat of loss, where you scratch at the poor diet

of what you can recall or of what says:these are the people I’m from. You refuse to leave

the lifetime of objects you’ve storeddown to a braid of your childhood hair. And here

we watch the pacing African wild dog whose pawsshould never leave prints in snow, whose breath in this cold

ices his muzzle. The animal’s worn path is a sorry replacementfor its instinct to roam. There are times I want to disown

my kind. But what’s wild in me is tempered by the wayyour hands involuntarily shake. You say, Let’s make

our way to the wolves. We look through the one-way glass,where within reach of us, the animal tears at a bone.

Elegy for My Mother’s Mind

When I steady your step on the stairs, you ask not once but twicewhere we’re going—to the car, to the store, Mom, remember?

You laugh and say you thought we’d be walking and we are,right into the part of your brain where you’ll lose me, lose

the child who picked all 43 tulips you waited a solid Chicago winterto watch bloom. Lose the girl who pedaled her Schwinn

up and back the U-shaped driveway while you fried baconbehind the evergreens in an electric pan so the house wouldn’t smell.

We’re walking into your head where it’s just beginning to snow,and no matter how quickly I shovel, the path will go blank.

But this night, grackles above us blacken the treeand you hold on to me as you get into the car. Together, we go

to the store where you try on every clearance-marked blouse and buynothing. You’re forgetting sadness, too. That pool

where you used to swim with an armload of bricks,where no slow tug of a rope could pull you from the bottom.

You’re forgetting about anyone but you, when before dawnon the piano you pound Great Balls of Fire and The Old Rugged Cross

and whistle in searing vibrato. You buy Dollar Store Kleenexto give as gifts. You pour beans into wine bottles. You lift my chin and say,

I’m so glad you were born—then your pupils widen and tunnel back to a timebefore I was here, before my brothers or sister, before you lost

your father, a time of buses and rain, of radio static, and for a minuteyou’re far from me, so I take your hand and it trembles with all you know.

Psalm 23½

I leave the sloping bank of Thorn Creek, the cracked asphalt    of 170th Street and still windows washed with vinegar shine.

Bricks hosed and cleared of vines hold on    to crumbling grout. On a ladder my father scoops leaves

from the gutter never putting off till tomorrow    what he can do today. How vain

to think distance might change the lines on my palm    or the chapter and verse lodged under

my tongue. The Lord is my shepherd,        but I don’t want the green pasture or the still water

or a doily under my tea. I don’t want    the doll with eyes that open and close or the shattered oak

with one living limb that my mother insists on...