Bones and Teeth

Bones and Teeth

When the poet scattered her mother across the unsettled lake,
she expected cigarette ash—a light clean burning. We expected a poem
cobbled out of  rough wood—full of the salt and burn of splintered tears.
Instead, she gave us a poem about golden glass under a sun-kissed sky,
a hallmark poem, with words that floated just on the surface of the wet.

In class, when she talked it, she spoke of bones and teeth,
and finding mother’s partial in the dust of cremation,
how hard it was to throw mother away—into the wind.
She made us see, the way ash clung to clothes and hands,
how wind brought mother back into nostrils and eyes—
how slowly mother disappeared beneath rumpled water
on a wind ripped day.

When the poet wrote it, there was the softness of nothing,
pretty words on pastel paper, but when the poet spoke it,
she got down to the bones and teeth and tears, down to the bottom
of the lake where the muck congeals and the fish eggs wait.
The poet could not hear that in the telling was the poem,
and in the writing was the child—made to throw her mother
away beneath heaven’s seemingly indifferent sky.