Strangers
A sighing through screens
- the leaves whisper –
and rain. The streets darken.
In another city, your mother
is lost in sleep.
They can’t say whether she dreams,
Among her things, we found a note
from someone I never knew:
“Mommy, I love you.” Perhaps
she dreams of you, wading home
through waves of Kansas wheat
bringing a stringer of bullheads.
I hear her voice in the
breathing dark.
Womanblood. Earthscents. Shadows.
I feel closer to her than to you –
when you come in,
heavy and sorrowful – the world
reduced in your eyes.
I am the china doll
you won at some carnival
though you can’t seem to remember
how, or even why.
I am as helpless as she is.
No gesture touches this rain –
this long night, the heart
that will not be still, that keeps on
beating – frail, blind bird
caught in a slow
contraction, expansion of bone.
We are all caught. It’s as if
we are in her dream.
I begin to love you like a son.
When you first come in,
bent over against the rain,
I want to call out the name of your father.
