More on: motherhood

Like a dark miracle, they sleep, two am at a truck stop outside Indianapolis; my husband of three cities, three years— flycatcher, scrub jay, kingfisher; our baby daughter, little chickadee, pale wrinkle, my inkling. A motherless girl who now mothers, I am loved twice, two orchids, two glimpses of the afterlife, two clear-wing butterflies, two…

LENT SHOULD BE in the summer that she might make use of the hotel pool, bandaged up outside like an open wound. She never had a pool. She had a cat but her cat is dead. Buried in leftover snow behind the garage until the ground softens. It would be nice to swim in a pool.…

I HAVE A BLACK AND WHITE photograph taken in 1967 that I found among my grandmother’s things after she died. In the foreground, my grandmother sits on a blanket, smiling self-consciously for the camera. To her left my brother stands in a seven-year-old boy’s macho pose with hands on hips, his smooth, hairless chest thrust…

National Geographic Explorer You swing through the broad high-branching trees and what hangs from your breast, your stolen charge, flounces like a rag doll clung to by a child whose parents disappeared behind a train’s ashen door. You hover above, primate Eve, as if what you hold could forever be held past passing eons and…

You enter that light which binds night and day, that swirling mist of pain, fortunate pain, which has no need to be seen. It shimmers on the ever-present, ever- inactual shore. Simple worker, like those who build men’s houses— Breathe life into the whirlwind where the dead shall find you, dear friends absorbed in daylight.…

How I would like to believe in tenderness— —Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”   HOLY SEPULCHRE Mausoleum and Cemetery sits in a fenced green block on Ridgeland and 111th Street, five minutes south of my apartment. I pass that corner at least once a week, and when I pass it, I pass…

———-Looked for her in the unseen—in the play of air ———-against the edge of ———-what appeared to be— a child’s laugh in a neighbor ———-yard could recall her, ———-only to call her back into what had passed—sought ———-her in dreams, but she ———-waited at one side in the not to be dreamed of ———-yet, neither…

Three things you can’t control: life, death, and children. Lord knows, you’ve tried. Good God knows, there’s holy risk just beyond the farm lane’s bend. And the paper and the radio shout of doom-oh-doom-oh. Yet you can force certain things to taste as you expected; you can bake brave resolution into rhubarb, its stiff pink…

IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…

A long time spent trying, kneeling, to light a votive for my mother from a votive for another. Each fire floats on shallow viscous water. With my stick, I wet wicks, extinguishing prayers instead of sending up mine: I loved you every day, will. My stick blackens, does not carry light. Evening bells ring. The…