The Message I Receive
When I search for the word mother in my writing file,
four-hundred pages of thoughts—scattered, half-formed—
I’m told: Too many results to show. And, of course, I think:
there’s a poem here. What else can I make of my longing?
I begin again with verbs. My mother carries
a bouquet of orange flowers (cosmos or coreopsis).
My mother worries about the weather. In a dream,
my mother tells me she’s in a movie about the future.
Come closer, she says. There’s something I need to show you.
Which is how I imagine the world spoke to her, beauty
drawing her in again and again. Redstarts, kinglets, orioles;
Lake Michigan, green and white-capped; our yard,
beautiful with snow. As a child, I remember my mother
walking the beach in Beverly Shores, her head down
as she searched the sand for crinoids: fossils—
like beads, unstrung—which came from the stems
of sea lilies. I don’t remember why she collected them,
whether she ever intended to thread a string through the opening
where the animal’s soft tissue used to be. Something to wear—
a necklace or bracelet. Or something to carry, like a rosary,
as she moved through the world she couldn’t help
but love.
