ash

leave the door open just a crack
and a cold breeze sidles across the floor
our mothers slip into some mumbling dream
their wax-paper skin translucent as time
that lifts generations of leaves

they begin to speak in a language
they used to know before our infancy intervened
as if they never cut their hair
and it fills a whole room
with the volume of a birth-song

maybe their passing is one gusting exhalation
of light and a vacating of voices
which have been in labor
all these long years
of our wasted lives

even we plant our seed
in the mothers of our children
we are re-born in them
we empty ourselves
sometimes hope is a backward looking

a reminiscence of a future
already lived in some broken revolution
spinning through another universe of impossible
the door flies open
shadows with the force of gales

rattle porcelain heirlooms
a stampede from the pastoral linage
a pail of spilled milk
blood of fowl upon a dulled paring knife
the grinding-wheel's coarse edge

a sun-bleached cotton dress
heather in a garden
a wormy radish in earth-darkened fingernails
the sprouting of a green potato skin
sunlight through corn-dust in a crib

the half-warmth of a blue-veined hand
laid against a cheek
red runny nose
a waft of tomato soup
wet washcloth for sweaty locks

song almost in whisper on the long unlit hearth
darkness of solstice held back by sparking log
when tiny cinders glow they speak a truth
one by one they darken to ash