Martha Silano

Mirabile dictu

La Traviata reminds me my mother is a corpse.
Those first few days the birds came so close,

a yellow warbler while I ate my ham on rye.
Now, a cloud is giving the moon a black eye.

Which clothes was she buried in I do not ask.
Who touched my mother last?

I’m a being chased by birdsong: sparrow, bunting, wren.
This is neither nightmare nor game.

Though they lace my kale, I do not brain the snails.
She’s underground. Surrounded by a wooden fence.

The fog is giving the night a reason to feel safe.
So sorry, little flower, for not knowing your name.

That week she became the heron in the muck;
that week a chickadee landed on our truck.

She who was not my compass, not my map.

Gray

I have seen enough gray for one day,
in the steel-gray clouds, threatening

in the east. In the wistful trill of a sparrow,
on the floating dock where a dozen 

glaucous-winged gulls preen.
I have seen enough bleached logs,

enough undersides of silver-fir fronds,
enough buoys and sailboats (masts down),  

enough clam shells and smooth, round rocks.
I have sat long enough on a plank of wood 

balanced on two stumps, gazing at a tree trunk
in the momentary sun, imagining my gray- 

whiskered father in a room in a bed all alone,
his brain a cement lump, his ashen body cold.