Mother Is a House
Father is a stump grinder,
a heavy planter. Shovel fingers
bulling through onions and leeks.
Truck-hands lashed to maroon suspenders.
Head in the dirt, a blue exhaust
trailing from grub-working teeth,
hefting clumps and yellow ***-ends,
raising clammy clay blooms.
Mother is a house,
most of it closed.
Sometimes an upper window opens.
net-curtains fly out of gray eyes.
A girl-ghost
not yet locked in a bottle,
waves above my head.
She lifts me up on a rope
of sunshine, to her bedroom.
A mahogany night-dresser
tucks away secret hugs.
She has closets, drawers
where lovers doze.
She whispers, less we all awaken.
Outside father crashes through turnips.
Mother bleeds moss
from nub bitten fingernails.
She pushes a child into rooms
called buried-lost, buried-found.
The dead are everything –
she copes not with the living.
She is a draining board.
I am a basin.
Mother scrubs with red knuckles,
until I pour and curl
by her porcelain sink.
Later I listen to father grunt over her,
as he spades
a reluctant moon
between broken roots.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2019
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