Pondfields

                      where mom jumps out the car

so polite she can shut the door behind her

She can’t sense me but sees a greater world

something other than mothering: roads drawing

in baby finches and the stench of the present—

this sterling stillborn. Mountain ridge knuckles

on broad flat valleys. Pondfields where looming

egrets sigh on desk-lamp legs, where armadillo-

skinned palm trees burn at the fronds. Bald tires

churn up grass. It’s not just that a mother delivers

her child but that only a child delivers her mother

and not just that a life is avoidable but that life

is not to be avoided. Rehearsed as ever she sinks

like a message into the deep ocean of habit.