Letter to my Daughter

Sometime past midnight

I am reading your note, the story of your equinox afternoon. I smell the sugary musk of rain and rot. I see the field and you in slow motion playing with a ball that gets away and rolls into the elongating shadows of the trees. I am a slug munching leaves there and twitch my antennae in the vibrating air as you pass. You kick the ball back into the open under the cloudless sky.

Tomorrow the light will begin its retreat, allowing my world to sink back into its roots. In breath, out breath. Bittersweet. Little Molly is curled here beside me, her thin black lips hidden by white hair.

I love you always.

Mom
2003

Mélancolie Mécanique

Dear Mother,

I was in the world
a succession of strangers.
How was I to know?
The dog goes on her lonely
way. I forgot about you for
years. Morning has me

in her claw; disheveled, vacant.
Before sunrise the hard bounce
re-tooling of the clockwork day
is done and the great wheel set
between the glittering city
and the far-flung sea.

I called last night. They told me
you were still dead and too busy
but I know you were there, silent
as the white owl come to the terminal
edge. Now it is up to the rain and 
chance. Y nosotros, tus perdidos.


II.

The wind is idling down the road.
It passes with a backward glance.
It is an old conversation, one I can
neither remember nor forget. No
word means the same thing twice.
I miss you. That I remember in the

mother tongue. They will deny
everything. Potato-bug begins her
trek across the day. I stop to let her
pass. Ant rushes by. Dandelion opens
to the sun. In this inherited dawn,
first light slanted just so catches

movement, something struggling in
the indifferent gears, washed in by
the collapsing wave, cornflower sea
glass eyes etched with irreconcilable
horizons. Beast or demon? But I am
getting ahead of the story.


 asha

Confessional

Come my dear deformed ones
who live after the fire,
my darlings blistered and raw,
whose eyelids have burnt off,
who sleep with open eyes.
Come you jackals of pain.
But there is a screen between us,
the confessional screen.
I can barely see you in the gloom.
A spider is caught in my side, a fly in yours.
I grab the mesh with my six legs and squint in.
You are dressed in black, sweating.
I lick the wire to taste your salt.
I hand you a tiny drum, ask you to accompany me
as I confess. You weep.
I hand you a violin, ask you to play for me.
My dreams walk behind me with hollow footsteps.
There are so many echoes I cannot sleep.
You are reading a magazine.
You hand me a gun so I can shoot myself.
I watch your booth fill with water.
You are circling mindlessly in the middle of it,
awaiting my confession—but the land is miles off.
No matter how loud I shout, you can't hear me.
You press your eyes against the screen so hard
their jelly oozes in through the openings.
A thousand images hatch in the dim space,
writhing over one another. Some live. Some die.
Your eyes have a fiendish fervor.
You hand me a clock that runs backwards.
You give me an hour.    
AN HOUR!
Already the clock is disappearing in my hands,
images clogging its gears—legs, feelers, screams.
It’s a horrible sight.
You stand up.
Vanish.
Then call back,
"Sing the Alleluia Chorus three times.
Bathe in blood. Give your teeth to the poor".


asha .

Skin Trade

Mother,

There is always a market for flesh
even now
sunlight in thorns
they are hungry for us
make ordinary what is not
dying
the innocent know this

they reach back
future to memory
faces repeating themselves
a lime-green inch worm
toiling over jumbled foot stones

in the membrane
the breathing cage
there is no short cut to the old cities
in the necessary air

I am sitting in a chair
          imagine me
I move my right hand
          move yours from the dirt

touch me

it is easy
this regeneration
a habit natural as spring
we the living have come to
expect it

you know it is a gift
the last thing
the dying pup saw from the heap
after they skinned everything
but her eyelashes.

asha