Mosaic

I’m a’kickin’ but not high, and I’m a’flappin’ but I can’t fly. — Florence Church A carpet of light, the ocean alive < half a moon muting the stars. I tell myself despair    is just a bad attitude:Get up, I say.Look— and the shimmer spends its name in my head. _____ These days    midlife holds the jagged edge: my nephew in prison, a prisoner> friends insane with work or sick of trying to be loved, my parents handing over their lives like evidence: my good mother, her mind     a trail of crumbs in a woods flocked with birds. --/-- To raise a child    break it like a wild horse — bend the will:get up, get dressed. I remember Emlen School staring me down, my lunch box, September: the spiked fence freshly painted. Then, the goodbye from my mother who’d fought my hard hair, lipstick like mist on my cheek. --/-- That instant when eyes meet and slide away — even love blinks, looks off like a stranger. With: Who are you with? --/-- I suspect everything. Outside the air moves a giant bird I cannot see. Still laced in this brown body: my aging heart — a-loom     a-loomdoom— still minds my thoughts, but rolls his eyes. _____ To see >< to be seen:  the life of the visible.  Don’t be shy. Glances pick my face. Once, I was a sperm and an egg, but they didn’t see me. --/-- Too small to walk alone: I held my father’s index finger. Philadelphia police caped in their black jackets — big badges     almost hungry — looking at us. --/-- In a mall: say a food court on Saturday     or a stadium just before the game. There’s this drone, this steady, muttering thrum punctured by packages — plastic this, paper that — torn and torn. “It’s hard not to be hungry.” --/-- Time     for bed: my mother reading The Three Little Pigs