Lord, it is dark in here.
Lord, help me open the cedar drawer in the smoke heart
of my mother’s dress. Lord, it is stuck and I
am bent here, grasping. This time
help me not find the torn sheet
inside, the one signed Eva, her name
that means breath, and signed Clare,
her name that means light. Lord, it is dark. Help me
find the glass nest where she left the pins from her hair
and the memory of her hair falling
down into a hole in the earth my father dug
(believing in mercy and dirt) and dug
never knowing when digging
was no longer praying. Lord,
it was dark. In the drawer
the paper is turning to cotton;
in the drawer her empty dress flowers.
In here it is dark, but I can’t lie down.
Is her dress a field or a door? Will you
say she can hear me? Tell me, O Hours,
O Brute Force of Boards
Loosening, if the door’s
blue is regret and if its reds
are the reds of your mountains’ air
or of the inside of me sleepless,
the inside of my knees pressed
into the floor as I bend and rasp at the handle.
When I open the drawer, Lord, be
there with me, wrapped in that glass nest.
Or tell me there is no drawer.
Tell me her dress is a flower.
Tell me it is opening.
Sally Rosen Kindred’s third poetry collection is Where the Wolf (Diode), winner of the Diode Book Contest and the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Cincinnati Review’s MiCRos series, and Kenyon Review Online.