My Mother’s Things
My mother's things...
in the very last of the death boxes:
umpteen beautiful crystal bottles filled
with exotic perfumes from foreign lands,
pounds of barbaric jewelry, ancient bones and stones.
A jug full of bells.
A jug full of bells...
some of them tongueless, voiceless.
Poetry...even a book of poetry- the poet being an old, dead lover
of my mother Wild Honey.
The belt she made at camp when she was fourteen.
My second grade report card...
my teacher notes my "enormous imagination" and my "sense of humor."
(It was nice of her to write that…
I can't think of anything worse than me as a funny second-grader.)
I have my mother's old love letters.
She also saved every word I ever wrote to her.
I have her silks - yards and yards of red silk and purple.
I'm going to make my photograph in them....the silks.
I have her passport, her library card...
her statue of Obi Wan Kenobi.
I have her eyes...her cheekbones....
her blood....
her ashes.
