II: Daughters

I admit I missed the money.
It's like having windows without
glass, like the sudden persistent
stench of sewers on a pleasant
evening's walk, always
reckoning failure into the account
while hope has shrunk to worry.
I would sit alone in the kitchen
when the children were in bed
while he found somewhere else
to hide and I would drink
coffee watching as the light died.
He would come home sick with
beer saying, "Baby, it's dark in
here," and flick on the light.
O God, don't cry. It's like
looking up and seeing the whole
building's derelict: places
need people or they die.
A heart can crack and fill
with dust when the money never
comes, when there's no trust.
One day while I was cleaning I
looked for whatever it was
we lost–

The room in which my mother
died is like a sleeper snared
in dreams, motionless, distant.
On her dresser are cheap plaster
kittens, perfume in swirls of globular
glass tied with velvet ribbons, their
scents forever sealed, and at the
wall is a television placed to
face the bed. Memories
accumulate like rumpled sheets,
straightened, smoothed, and
disarranged again, but always
indecipherable even to the
most elaborate and passionate
intelligence. My parents' life
for me is a series of specimens,
in the end unknowable.

A room is the still mirror of a mind.
Whatever it is we lost, I know we'll never find.

In church again, returning
to the word people pass on
as the word of God, the
organ stops suddenly on
the fourth verse:

Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away

All children, God. All children.

They fly forgotten as a dream

Our voices which before seemed
strong enough to fill the
high-ribbed sanctuary now
unaided quiver, shatter like
glass under the heavy weight.
Even together, we are alone.
We must find shelter in the organ's sound.
I touch my daugher's shoulder
and she leans against my thigh,
an eye of hope, a seed.
Amazing how simply
need answers simple need.