Image courtesy of The Public Domain Archive
after my father dies, my mother gives me her bouquet
Some time soon after the wedding she dyes
her white, two-piece street-
length skirt and jacket
black—for funerals, she says. And I wonder did she, less
than a year after the fact, attend her father-in-law's
in that? No one the wiser, having missed its debut, no guests
at the traveling wedding, staged mid-term. My father had to collect
her, stuck between college and home, drove 200 milesthrough a spring blizzard, running roadblocks, ignoring police,
snow drifting across the Panhandle in deep piles,
answering her trapped here, thick-
voiced help! from a patrolman's radio. Are you crazy?! asked
her fellow travelers at the truck stop. Wait a while!!
But they jump in, no snow tires, his first winter trip.
walking on eggshells
bird on a perch we can learn to dome
the feet reactivate muscle fiber
and lost nerve ground relax breathe
make space for a whole flock to nest
to rest underneath stepping from one clutch of bone
smooth shell to the next careful to maintain
an arch you only now learn your kind
requires to survive. it was always about the feetwhatever size color number
of eggs. we were meant to go shoeless. leave
no trace. use our soles like palms to gather
food and information. to find our way
across an endless stretch of beach
delivering love from death
