Lilly Makes An A
My daughter sits in the kitchen with a square of paper,
her big black shoes crossed tight under the chair.
When the teakettle whees, I tip it up
and watch her dark brown stare, intent as a sparrow's,
following the letter curving out of her gripped pencil.
In her eyes I see the black linoleum
of St. Helena's hallways, shining like urine
on a cloudy winter day. Water melting from black rubber boots
in a row, the cloakroom smelling of feet and snow.
In front of our desks Sister Mary Francis
outlines our first letters on a blackboard.
White flakes twirl down windows.
A tall, black robed woman against black --
nothing else showing of how she stood
nor how her long legs met her hips
or the smooth muscle of her arms shivered.
Instead the blazingly white chalk meets the hard board.
Her voice startlingly calm, sweet as a flower:
"Children, take out a piece of lined paper."
The acrid rubber nipple of a curved glue bottle
on the corner of my desk smelled orange like the wood,
perfume soaked into the room.
I put it in my mouth and sucked on it to stop
the excitement in my stomach that spurted up
when I put my pencil to the soft page
the way she touched the board with her stick of chalk.
I am making a letter, a mark on the page
that grows out of my body like a root in a cage,
a tall black shape beautiful and strange.
It will tell everyone what I cannot say.
When I look up, she smiles at me.
We are speaking, the sister and I.
A hot wave begins carrying me out of the high
square windows, over the black upright piano,
beyond the rows of heads shining like brown pennies.
My body quivers:
my voice is louder than God's.
We put the pencil boxes away.
Look, Lilly says.
I made an A.
Wild Mustard
Abandoning the paper on the driveway,
I walk out into the stillness of the desert
tingling from the night's rain, sage and juniper
pale silver in the dazzle of light tilting the buttes,
the cloud of blue mesa lying on the horizon
when an unmistakeable lime scent pours off the wind
from the first tips of green standing in water,
a speck of purple blossom I scoop up on my finger
to smell its scraggy moist leaf, its perfect four-petalled cross
sprung up through the hard brown clay of winter:
wild mustard, the desert's first flower.
How can something so small awaken this land,
this lingering bittersweet greenness
that makes my body tremble for more of its fragrance
as it drifts through this bright air, announces its presence
to the horses standing in shimmered grasses,
the flying bellies of geese
the child tying a string on her bike,
and I who stand dumbstruck on a walk
through a field of wild sweet mustard.
What is it in this life I cannot find?
What god is it I am looking for?
Igneous God
Roots of this mountain are granite,
white, light crystals that cooled slowly
under great pressure
underneath the surface
changed themselves into rock
that glitters in the sun.
My ancestral core
is a blue bottle fly on my father' s brown arm, singing
before he smacks it.
The anger in me
a blue white flame
that wants to stay lit.
What did he do, what did he not do?
a dark hand on his neck
pushing his feet, his running, quick feet
my terror behind the door at the sound of his coming
was a wall of river water,
a force so strong it could knock you
across the room, a flame blown out.
The force of my mother wheedled itself in
with pincers, pliers, and a sewing needle
through the heart and eye.
You'll never marry, she said. You'll never have children.
For years we did not speak.
I walked up and down the streets,
east-west across New York's neck,
she in her northern house, quilting,
trying not to hear each other' s cries.
Now I live in red rock country.
Lemonade berry blossoms blow through the canyons.
Deer eat them, tiny and sweet, one by one.
My husband leans over Lilly to watch her draw
and blue star flowers fall out of her eyes.
Water pours from spring thunderstorms,
fills up the dry arroyos. It's almost summer.
Time to take in the white sheets blowing in the air.
Time to call my sister and ask her to visit.
Time to close up the fireplace and plant the garden.
To dust the picture of my mother on the piano again.
To say my father' s name, once.
This isn't the end but the beginning.
It's a sienna petroglyph soaring in the sky,
a Moenkopi sand flute tumbling in wind.
It's the pair of yellow orioles flying
among the spring green sunflowers,
lighter than light.
It's the sound of the igneous river, rattling and pushing
through the canyon, hurtling stones, so deep
and fast does it want to flow.
White Cloud
The white cloud is not afraid
to pass through the black mountain.
She hangs like breath, the warm arms
of a mother in the sky
drifting gentle over the world,
dissolving toothed peaks
that reappear streaked with mist.
She sleeps in the sky,
becomes water, becomes a crooked piHon,
a woman carrying a bundle,
a boy under a three-hundred-year oak
over and over playing a note
on a small, metal harmonica.
Impermeable
At first she can't believe how it tilts up,
rocks back under her ridged finger, this
bobbled mineral grown in the dark of her mouth,
foreign as a diamond glittering in a mine.
How to explain a moveable stone
like the shell of her hand, the bones of her toes,
the calcified wings of her six-year-old ribs.
The invisible density that grows within.
I want to cradle the hard parts of her,
the clicking tips of her jazz tap shoes,
her name on the board for disobeying rules.
What is it I am afraid to lose?
Don't push, I say. It will come on its own.
Still she worries and wiggles the tiny gem
that prickles and squeaks like chalk in her head
until it hangs from her pink gum by a thread.
Fairies, I whisper, under your bed?
She won't yank it, won't let me pull.
The yellow doors close. She's off to school,
a glass opening I cannot pass through.
In the warm, lumbering bus she presses it down
wincing when the last string of root goes loose.
Blood on her tongue, a funny taste. The tooth
bounces and rolls down the aisle's chute
until Judy, in her big jacket, brakes.
Kneels down and gropes around the gummy space.
The boys cover their mouths. The girls squeal.
What is this great happiness they all feel, that sends
her running through the gate to shout Mommy, it's out!
She unwraps the milk tooth, little as a letter,
translucent against the brown lunch paper,
and caresses its curved tips with her pink finger.
Something formed in me falls away into the light air.
On her neck, white diamonds appear.
copyright 2004-2009 Sandra Dorr