These Hills

J. Scott Brownlee

What they do not tell you about being a son

is that someday you’ll lift your mother out of necessity

& not know how to answer the deep ache in her

that refuses to leave from the botched surgery

on her four neuromas. They won’t mention the graft

of your skin on her skin you would give if it meant

her nerve cells might repair instead of defeat her

—their synapses flooded by the twice-daily pill

with a lyrical name that has strewn only wreckage

across her psyche for two decades so damaged

Achlys wouldn’t want them. Yes, a body can fade

& fragment in these hills like the green-veined

granite tumoring toward blossom, or a bloody

membrane between weeds & cedars. Hope was

a scalpel once. I could slide it across anything & be

healed completely was a dream she told me

repeats in her REM sleep. How do you

give someone who is burning permission

to vanish? Will she reincarnate as a gull

or the gray wave of foam a rogue hurricane

heaves up the local river with a serene quiet

worse than any crashing? How long have I been

still enough to witness it? This is grief. This is seeing your mother suffer, & a wound made memory.

This is flame transforming: not a prayer but a fire

unquenchable covering our hands, our feet,

the neuromas clinging to our metatarsals

with a persistence so complete we feel no pain

stepping into the mansion in the sky

midnight is preparing. I collect every match

in its kitchen cabinets—scatter them

throughout each inch of this house

& its dry acreage in a dead galaxy

of black hole-filled pastures. I hear

a mockingbird calling her name as I strike

the first one & watch as it consumes the two

closest to it until there is a circuit of fire

connecting my lit skin to hers. Where a son

grieves a mother: a constellation. Where two bodies

meet failure: one crippling brilliance. I brighten 

where she does & darken where she does until

we cool to quartz, feldspar, mica, the bedrock

of this firmament no god could have sculpted

or made more imperfect, which is me holding her.

I speak with the future.

Jane Hirshfield

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 

We hear with our skeletons’ bones.

We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 

a walled garden. 

Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.

A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.

Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.

Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,

restarts. 

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.

Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, 

in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine.