Please do tell me if this poem makes any sense
Last Night at Home
-
and my mother goes with the dogs
for a walk. I toil with laundry bins
and bleach, drying the last of my clothes
in the dark. When they’re tumbling, I sliver
outside to my father’s backyard.
-
I pick a snail up from the dirt
then put him down again, miles off
on the lip of an ivory hydrangea.
He curls inside himself when I whisper
You live somewhere else now, too.
-
Behind the beech tree through
the gaps in our moldy back fence, in a window
of light I can watch the neighbor girl’s landmine face
waning and waxing, chest falling, rebuilding.
-
The great cathedral of her mouth is echoing
with practiced song, her brother’s sitting,
listening with ears that burn his skull—
So this is love, she keens, So this
is love? When my mother comes back
-
she looks up at the ether and points
with her stubby fingers so like mine
at the small light of mars which only
she, I think, would notice. She tells me
-
one of the old stories, about
the little sister of the world, who inherited
a box of ingredients
that never made anything edible.
