they looked for her continually, on land and shore and water.

Her bra lay under his house like a pair of wings buried.

When they found it, they found him and held on to him to kill him.

The year before, I had gone waterskiing within sight of Alcatraz,

I hoped I looked cool. I knew nothing.

And today I know almost nothing.

I know you were clean, Stephanie, and smart, and good,

and belonged only to yourself, and to those who loved you.

That Goddess

When I said to the therapist, I’m feeling kind

of calm, but there’s a sort of emptiness, as if

something’s missing, but I don’t know what it is—

he said, Maybe that’s mourning, you’re mourning

that goddess you thought your mother was,

the one who—if only you’d been lovable—

would have loved you. And I could see her, a columbine

in scarlet and gold empress robes with

pagoda shoulders. And though you could not

possess a goddess, you could glimpse her, a swallow,

aimed as a pair of eighth notes, ravenous.

The universe had not been meaningless—

giant ants rushed with her smoothness,

her chip-of-jet scepters. And at times

of high wind, it would stand and shudder

all over, the vertical sea of her green

aspen dress with its thousands of flashing breasts.

Some things were almost too big to be her,

but I had been inside my mother,

and looked up, and seen the blue-black

vault of her viscera above me sparkling with gallstones.

And her unseen existences,

each small mammal royally pettable, each

strokable coat of each carnivore, each

burrowful of the blind wild young.

The earth was holy. Water in the wind

wrote her. She did not like me, but I was

her daughter, child of the snake and the egg,

of the spectrum and the orb spider—

I, unholy and unblessable,

the spawn of a queen, who rode, without

her body, across the arc of space, not

looking this way, her eyes, behind their

ashy patches, rolled back into her head, she was

seeing the endless emptiness beyond us.

When my mother was a fresh corpse, still

moist, still in translation’s magic,

it was as if she’d escaped, leaving us

holding the clothing of her flesh. My mother’s

love, the absence of my mother’s love,

meant the world to me—this

world, in which I wasted my life

on the ecstasy of craving.

Wasn’t Afraid Of

It’s funny I wasn’t afraid of my mother

after she was dead—an hour after.

It’s strange to me. As she’d done her long,

complex dying, breathing, not breathing,

the baby rattle, the diamondback rales, her

face moistening as if lifting into

a low cloud, or lowering,

over a stove, a kettle for a steamer, God’s

kitchen towel over her head—as she had

died, and died, she was bringing me close to

our species at its nuptials

with its dying. I held her, circled in my arm—

not to hold her back—and yet

how could she go—as if the blue-wreathed