The Relics

1. brett returns my mother to the wilderness

I slipped them into my friend’s palm — 

the tiny crucifix, and dove,

from off my mother’s pendant watch — 

and I asked her to walk them up through the brush

toward timberline, and find a place

to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now,

she writes, “I walked up the canyon at dusk,

warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon,

came to an outcrop, above a steep

drop — far below, a seasonal

creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder

and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the

love in the world, and I sent the talismans

flying off the cliff. They were so small,

and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or

heard them land.” My mother is where

I cannot find her, she is gone beyond

recall, she lies in her sterling shapes

light as the most weightless bone in the body, her

stirrup bone, which was ground up

and sown into the sea. I do not know

what a soul is, I think of it

as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she

is wild now with it, she touches and is

touched by no one knows — down, or

droppings of a common nighthawk,

root of bird’s foot fern, antenna of

Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the

huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was

something deeply right about

the physical elements — atoms, and cells,

and marrow — of my mother’s body,

when I was young, and now her delicate

insignias receive the direct

touch of the sun, and scatter it,

unseen, all over her home.

 

I had not wanted them, and I hadn’t known

what to do with them, the minuscule

symbols of my mother’s religion,

I looked for a crack in the stone floor of the

cathedral but could not find one. Then I thought

of the wilderness near Desolation,

and asked my friend to carry them up

to a peak of granite, and let the wind take them. Since

then, it has been as if my mother’s

spirit matter has been returned

into the great bank of matter,

as her marrow had been sifted down into

the ocean. It doesn’t matter, now, if I

ever wanted to disassemble

my mother. The sixteenth-of-an-inch-

across cross, and the silver line drawing

of a dove are cached, somewhere, that is nowhere

to be found. Now I think of the nature of metal, and how

long the soul-dolls of her trust will last in their

spider-egg-sac of roots, needles,

quartz, feathers, dust, snow, shed

claw. Her belief she would have an eternal

life was absolute, I think.

It would not be good to think of my mother

without her God — like a hermit howling in the

moonscape of a desert. Once, when she was old — like an

exquisite child playing a crone

in the school play — we talked about heaven.

She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she

knew her father would be there, and her elder

brother, and her second husband —

maybe it was a heaven for four,

the three men and her. It was so

easy to make my mother happy

in her last years, to tell her that I

could just see her, as a kitten, in God’s

lap, being petted. Her eyes sparkled with more

beams than any other eyes I have seen.

I have sent the tokens of her everlasting being

into the high altitude.

They will shine long after I can sing her — sing what I

perceived through the distorted prisms of my vision.

I don’t know if I saw my mother

or did not see her. Day and night,

her charms will gleam in the brush or stream, will

reflect the mountain light in little

pieces of unreadable language.