Two Poems

My Mother’s Object Lessons

You fed and taught me at the same table, beside
the sliding door that led into the yard
and the lemon tree luring hummingbirds to hide

within the veil of leaves, each trembling one a shard
of jade in jade enfolded. To heal
my hunger and my ignorance—better, to guard

my soul—you lettered me with letters I could feel.
Because Ezekiel found the scroll was sweet
to taste, because our tongues can only taste the real:

you made the word of God be something we could eat.
My hunger had been blessed: I would be fed
and need would keep on being something we could meet. 

One time, you served a gleaming orange, having read
it would teach me decay can lurk behind
a beautiful surface. To keep me safe from dead

loveliness, you had carved a plug out of the rind,
eviscerated it of pulp and juice,
and pushed mud into the wet cavity. When lined

up right, the peel obscured this fetid wad of loose
earth. You called me to the kitchen, showed me
the fruit, then tore it open and let the sluice

of stinking dirt pour out. Sometimes, this memory
returns to say: all matter masks some
curse beneath its skin. When I smell citrus, I still see 

the damp mud seeping from the seam beneath your thumb.
Some guiltless things still bear the stain of guilt,
and all touched things conceal the ruin they become.

Instead, I wish the memory could be the lilt
of light on branches, as if no thick silt
of sin bunched wetly in them, waiting to be spilt. 

Faith Healing

Because he would not mourn as those who have
no hope, my grandfather donned a searing
white tuxedo for the funeral and 
asked us to visit the grave sparingly, 
to remember my grandmother without 
what seemed to him the dreary spectacle 

of grief. The family followed his wishes,
more or less, and so they made their stories
into their own memorial. The one
I heard most often came from the year
before my birth, when my parents moved in
to tend to her as she approached her end. 

My sister was twelve then, full of a child’s 
conviction. She’d just heard how Jesus found 
the man who had lain beside the water 
for nearly forty years and said: get up,
take up your bed and walk. Eyes lit, she ran 
straight to the cramped room where my Grandmother 

lay too weak to stand on her own. It had
been months since she could sit reading her Bible
at the kitchen table, rocking her foot
and shaving down the pitted hardwood floor,
leaving a groove that, in time, my mother
would show me to mark her own mother’s absence.

When my sister took her by the hand,
not knowing what prayers had already
been whispered in that room, my grandmother
resolved to guard her grandchild’s nascent faith. 
What else could she do when my sister declared: 
Levántate, párate y anda. 

Tenderly, they eased her feet onto the floor 
and shifted her weight off the narrow bed 
onto her shaking legs. Immediately,
she fell, taking my sister down with her.
“It wasn’t the fall,” my Mother says now,
“that I heard from the other room, but the laughter.”