From the poem "Voluble Dusk":
When the old mares pulled a night wagon
over day's end, she tucked me in;
she was mother then, and her moon face
came over me and I touched the cheeks
of the moon, and its soft dark curls,
and watched her mouth move with lulling
rhymes; I remember them; she would bathe
me, scrubbing me on a towel on the bed,
later holding my head in warm tap water
to lather my hair; I would cry, and they
would laugh and scold. Not long after,
the desert dark of madness folded long
wings around her; days and nights
of absence then, before her return without
tears or laughter. Forever afterward,
her face would shine in the crepuscule,
a luminosity that lingered there while
I sat at the piano, tentative girl learning
Schubert and Brahms. She listened in her
cherry platform rocker and drank;
to forestall our severing from one another
in the voluble dusk, I played on.
(from Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, 2013)
