Pendular praxis
echoplasmic ethos
who I was, am, will be
archaeologic, astrologic
effervestibules, efferventricles

‘Climacteric they’re called’
the fruit seller piped up
at Saturday’s farmers’ market
spelling it out for a woman rapt
(his brawny look likely assisting)

question:
a country, a constellation of Narcissus, is led by leaders stifling
its people through empty bellies, destitution, captivity, carnage,
& anguish.

Blue, blue eyes my Mama had,
Mumchy says, like the sky,
played piano like an angel—
sobbing, adds,
The big flu took her.
Papa died of it in The Great War.

Missing you turns
all sweet things sour.

Your acidic absence
singes the tip of my tongue.

You never did discover what popped the tires of your car. Once, you were young, and sweeter than a peach, not yet ripe with a pit that would crack teeth. You turned into a patch of upturned soil that didn’t have a seed.

I let you tour the university grounds before you had to leave and catch your train for the airport. I had not visited myself yet, though I had been here a month already. The buildings were brick.

but I have to someday, maybe today
or tomorrow or next week or when I'm
100 but it's going to transpire
and sometimes I wish I'd never been born
if all that happens to me in the end

Everything has an inner life:
the leaf twisting within wind;
the ant pacing sidewalk; the barista
burning your latte. To despair, they all curl

I have not been born yet   or conceived   or conceived of but I share my mother’s tale as the weight upon her precludes expression

Yanina. Poland. 1939. Daughter of a prisoner of war.

We made fun of him for decades
because one night after dinner,
he suggested we stay a while
at the table, which had a view
of Kowloon Bay, and the other side

The ordinary became softer
more pink in the clouds
wider open spaces of rolling green

a fine inlay of her fingers
amid mine      palms pressed
together      heartline
to heartline      lifeline

The precursor to the mirror is the mother.

The seer warned my mother of myself,

As an infant, one discovers love or

how the clearest glimpse of watered self

We hid in bamboo forests, thin trunks, boney branches. Translucent leaves caught in our curls. We longed to lose our eight and ten-year-old selves within dense stems, pitch our bullied bodies under leaf litter,

My body offers some companion as a rock in the bay tiderises to foot the black cormorant. Saltwater preys on metal and memory. You talked on strength watching planks bent in the steam box,
would only go wharfway among strangers,

From the ocean’s point of view,
an interruption. On Nantucket
where land costs ten million dollars
per acre, the Atlantic laughs
all winter, pounding at the center.

I still have your chair
positioned across from me
during meals. The chair
is not a token for you
and your absence but it is
where you actually sat

and you used to be a Merry-Go-Round of endless words, the looping of horses a blurred cycle gathering me from the dust of a fallen circle;

She did not mean the kind
stumbled upon in a wood, ringed

with bracken, spring-fed savior
of the lost child or mirror