In a Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me
Tonight over casual conversation,
words brought you up or out
from where I keep you,
and you were my stepmom again
and I was telling some of his family,
my family now, how it was
to have you as a mother figure
all growing up: you the keeper of lists,
you the flag in the moon, and the moon,
you the garden and the grave,
you who I held as the last air left.
And then you were what? What then?
Oh body where do we keep it?
Oh how I don’t offer enough.
In one sentence, in a Mexican restaurant,
you were alive, and then dead again,
and then we had a margarita. That can’t be
enough, can it? What do you want me to say?
Sometimes you were mean.
Sometimes I was angry:
you left me when I was fifteen,
you sent my dog to the pound,
you hung up on my brother.
But love is impossible and it goes on
despite the impossible. You’re the muscle
I cut from the bone and still the bone
remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants)
the flesh back, the real thing,
if only to rail against it, if only
to argue and fight, if only to miss
a solve-able absence.
