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a new not-want,
    a shalt-not-want not-want. As soon as I
    dared, around fifty, I called her, to myself,
    the A-word. And yet, now, if she goes,
    when she goes, to me it is like the departure of a
    whole small species of singing bird from the earth.
7.
Something Is Happening
    When it approaches, no one knows what it is—it is her
    brain tumor, flaring up again.
    My mother explains it to me—
Something
    is happening, and it is physical,
    and medical, and emotional,
    and spiritual.
She’s so sheerly lonely
    she is like the one member of a tribe.
    When she hears the doorbell—when it has not rung—
    and she runs to it, she is like an explorer
    of unseen deserts, unscanned rivers of
    asteroids. Her naked body is almost
    pretty, with its thousand puckers, maybe there’s a
    planet somewhere which holds this beaten-to-
    soft-peaks egg-white stomach the most
    desirable. It was painful to know her,
    such a feral one, untrained, unmothered,
    but now she is playing at the edge of some field,
    absorbed. There is something big coming,
    bigger than love, bigger than aloneness.
    She’s staying up all night for it.
    Something not an angel, not male or female,
    is leaning on her brain. Up from within
    the crease of the tumor, like the first appearance
    of matter, something is arriving—not
    her father, and not just death, but the truth,
    her self, soon to be completed.
8. Cassiopeia
    Just before dawn, the fixed stars
    stand over my mother’s house,
    and the queen’s throne seems to set
    as the earth turns away from it.
    But my mother is at her zenith—every
    hour or so, these days, she stops talking,
    and lets me have a turn, she squinches her
    face like a child concentrating, she
    knows this custom is important. Then
    she is off again, on her long carouse
    across the sky. There are two new
    people who worship her. Well I worship you
    myself, I say, for your good work
    with the young musicians, and she says in her new
    voice, Well I worship you right back.
    Then she tells me the tumor may be growing again,
    she has me finger the side of her radiant
    visionary childhood face, to feel,
    in the dent of her temple, the earth rising,
    coming for her. She tells me her dream in which her
    late husband, pissing in the goldfish
    pool, turns toward her, laughing. She laughs,
    her head thrown back, her hard palate
    an arc, her curls gleaming like the moonlit
    lake bush of an ancient Venus.
    She was not meant to be a mother,
    she never got to be a child until now—
    I feel I am back in an early time,
    when people were being tried out, combinations
    of flowers, and animals, and hinges of iron,
    and wheeling desire, and longing. I feel
    like an old shepherd on a hill. My lamb,
    who sickened so long, my first lamb, is gamboling.

PART FIVE :   One Secret Thing

Still Life
    At moments almost thinking of her, I was
    moving through the still life museum when my mother had her
    stroke. I was with the furled leeks, I was
    in the domain of the damp which lines
    the chestnut hide, of dew on snails,
    of the sweated egg, and the newts quick
    and the newts gone over on their backs, and the withered
    books—she was teaching someone, three
    time zones away, to peel and slice
    a banana, in the one correct way,
    and I was wandering ruins of breakfasts,
    broken crusts of a blackberry pie,
    the leg of the paper wasp on it done
    with a one-thread brush, in oil which had
    ground gold in it. She had alerted me,
    from the start, to objects, she had cried out
    in pain, from their beauty, the way a thing
    stood for the value of a spirit, an orange
    trailing from its shoulders the stole of its rind,
    the further from the tree, the more thinged and dried—
    my mother was a place, a crossroads, she held the
    banana and lectured like a child professor on its
    longitudes and divisible threes,
    she raised her hands to her temples, and held them,
    and screamed, and fell to her bedroom floor, and I
    wandered, calm, among oysters, and walnuts,
    mice, apricots, coins, a