She often let the air fill With graying leeks
The flies about the tomatoes Many flies she never would mind
Like up a cow's nose And cows would never never would mind
I thought she was crazy Singing tunelessly
By the green horses by the field We would pick cherries and strawberries
God was it green Was there ever so much sun
And the strawberries were obscene And too small for an American girl
And I could not taste that sugar anyways Because it was not America
No land of misshapen things and berries like ventricles No land of largesse
Here she was once gored In the desert of her throat by a dam
And there she was In the hospital dodging death as always
And she could not care Because we are speaking of my mother, because she is my mother
And before her another woman Once I felt her large hand
I thought we were in an orchard Before I spoke about fruit and the soft
And the sweet and the theft But this was walking down a path
The orchard is really not about the apples I imagined it was like church
Why couldn't Christ have been an apple? Now there's no body to remember
I probably saw the corpse I would have to ask my mother for her name
She was not a remarkable woman She was only family
Somewhere in the orchard was a fertility clinic Where they froze my child sperm
It was in the contract A cold chair and awful music
After the nurse came in She kept looking at the back of my phone
There was a burning apparition of Mary There was nothing at all
And I went home and they asked me So?
Which is not a question So we ate dry supermarket chicken
Years are cruel To the triagist
We forget the clinic And its baubled apples
All horses were broken And they wish me great success
It is their last chance to be beautiful and young And it is failing
They had but two chances And we are failing
And we are in endless love Which is to be failing
I don't understand my own patience Are we not all the face of history
We all stare each other over chicken So? So? So?
There is that which we want Like an ant on a berry
But who could be angry Because they are also failing