LIFE ALTAR

​

In the cafeteria’s dead light,
there was an opportunity to write
a dedication to an ancestor, or
leave a photograph. Munching on pita
from the event spread, wondering
what to write, I found a turquoise marker
in the pencil box, made a blue patch
in the notecard’s center and I wrote, This
is almost my mother’s favorite color,

the patch, the letters failing to flood
with those aquamarines glinting
from her ears, her impulses for cobalt
glass vases, sheets like waves, three bathroom walls
in blue flaring sky and petrifying it:
we lived in that color, a blue that tries
and fails into the cafeteria,
in through my attempt at truth, the window.

Weeks before, my mother and I stood
in an art museum parking lot. It was
barely spring. The train horn articulated
an atmosphere. Crows flitted like ash,
collected themselves onto power lines
and took up again, leaving us. She started
crying a little, handing me a carved
stone, turquoise from her recent trip. You
are the best thing that has happened to me,
she said, her eyes turning pink. I felt stupid.
I didn’t know what to say at all.

I laid my notecard at the Virgin’s feet. I hoped
no one would think I was trying to be funny.