Rose of Mary
My mother’s pots of rosemary were tall, manicured
cones, broom swept earthy smelling evergreen,
flecked with lavender drops of blossoms
the shape of small hearts or lips,
she’d send me outside to retrieve a stem each time
she baked a chicken: she pulled the thin skin away
from the bird’s flesh in one deft movement, a conductor’s
swift, intentional downbeat, she slipped her hands under,
gently, all the way up to the neck, the divet where
the bird’s head once was, a small chasm now,
she touched the shiny flesh with the tenderness
reserved for the newly born and the dying.
And then she’d insert the sprig – the Rose of Mary –
between the translucent skin and the damp flesh,
and in the bird’s cavity, where she’d stuck her hands
and pulled, working loose the insides – the duodenum
and the liver – into the vessel of the hen
she stuffed sliced lemons and rosemary,
and she reached inside and she rubbed it all down with salt,
her hand swallowed up to the wrist
and the bird spilling forth with the Meyer lemons from her tree
and the Rose of Mary from her garden pots, sweet earthy sprig
that blesses the bride, hearty living stalk that anoints the dead.
Perigee
for Sam
On the last day of his visit, my son is at home
and I am in the city and we meet for brunch –
he drives from the south and I leave from the north –
we meet askew of the center, two circles concentric.
He sits across from me, black coffee in front of him,
and his skin in winter is lightly tanned, the color
of the inside of an almond, not the drupe
nor the hard celluloid shell, but the hull that holds the fruit in place,
the unborn to the umbilicus, the flesh unculled.
In twelve hours he will have gone and he will be
30,000 feet above this land, he’ll fly
due east and resume his study of the universe and dark matter,
but right now I can watch the angle of his jaw – the obliquity
of the earth – right now the moon is at perigee.
When he moved through my body, his crown
the cosmos, I delivered him, he was already
in motion, he was already a force, momentum over time,
he was composing this moment already, this nexus between
his birth and his empyrean flight.
Taking Christmas Down
My mother leaves her tree up through
the New Year. When we were growing up, she was
scornful of neighbors who would haul their trees,
dried and bedraggled, to the curb on the 26th,
leaving it for the trashmen, as though they were in a hurry
to be done with Christmas, the extraction of a tree
like the amputation of an organ turned vestigial.
She waits until after the Epiphany – after the Wise Men
have visited the Christ Child – and then, she says, she is
taking Christmas down, bit by piece, she dismantles
the holiday: the German-made nutcrackers with their
faces of storybook characters and animals
and Gorbachev, even, his birthmark high on his rounded
wooden head. She puts away the Christmas table:
the tapered candles, the runner and the china,
the tedium of flatware-polished silver forks and spoons
small and large, the butter molds and the leaded crystal glasses
where the Akvavit was poured, lives toasted. She saves her tree
for last, taking down each ornament
skillfully, methodically, and then, her tree stands,
lit with one thousand tiny white lights, for several days more
it illuminates the living room, it is visible from the road
like the lights of a faraway village she visited, a younger woman then,
like Orion’s belt in the blanket of dark sky above the room
where she sleeps, now, the relics of a life stored in boxes,
the remains of a holiday put away.