just reach out and take them into my arms.

The Ebony Chickering

My mother cooked with lard she kept

in coffee cans beneath the kitchen sink.

Bean-colored linoleum ticked under her flats

as she wore a path from stove to countertop.

Eggs cracked against the lips of smooth

ceramic bowls she beat muffins in,

boxed cakes and cookie dough.

It was the afternoons she worked toward,

the smell of onions scrubbed from her hands,

when she would fold her flowered apron

and feed it through the sticky refrigerator

handle, adjust the spongy curlers on her head

and wrap a loud Hawaiian scarf into a tired knot

around them as she walked toward her piano,

the one thing my father had given her that she loved.

I can still see each gold letter engraved

on the polished lid she lifted and slid

into the piano’s dark body, the hidden hammers

trembling like a muffled word,

the scribbled sheets, her rough hands poised

above the keys as she began her daily practice.

Words like arpeggio sparkled through my childhood,

her fingers sliding from the black bar of a sharp

to the white of a common note. “This is Bach,”

she would instruct us, the tail of his name hissing

like a cat. “And Chopin,” she said, “was French,

like us,” pointing to the sheet music. “Listen.

Don’t let the letters fool you. It’s best

to always trust your ear.”

She played parts of fugues and lost concertos,

played hard as we kicked each other on the couch,

while the meat burned and the wet wash wrinkled

in the basket, played Beethoven as if she understood

the caged world of the deaf, his terrible music

pounding its way through the fence slats

and the screened doors of the cul-de-sac, the yards

where other mothers hung clothes on a wire, bent

to weeds, swept the driveways clean.

Those were the years she taught us how to make

quick easy meals, accept the embarrassment

of a messy house, safety pins and rick-rack

hanging from the hem of her dress.

But I knew the other kids didn’t own words

like fortissimo and mordant, treble clef

and trill, or have a mother quite as elegant

as mine when she sat at her piano,

playing like she was famous,

so that when the Sparklets man arrived

to fill our water cooler every week

he would lean against the doorjamb and wait

for her to finish, glossy-eyed

as he listened, secretly touching the tips

of his fingers to the tips of her fingers

as he bowed, and she slipped him the check.

Small Gods

I thought my father was a god,

like all the other fathers down the block, floating

home in their gleaming cars filled with food

and thunder, manna and a terrible noise.

And the mothers were lesser gods, fragile

in their thin robes, their hair

so many multicolored clouds.

And we were small, barely human, huddled