The Relics

1. brett returns my mother to the wilderness I slipped them into my friend’s palm — the tiny crucifix, and dove, from off my mother’s pendant watch — and I asked her to walk them up through the brush toward timberline, and find a place to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now, she writes, “I walked up the canyon at dusk, warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon, came to an outcrop, above a steep drop — far below, a seasonal creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the love in the world, and I sent the talismans flying off the cliff. They were so small, and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or heard them land.” My mother is where I cannot find her, she is gone beyond recall, she lies in her sterling shapes light as the most weightless bone in the body, her stirrup bone, which was ground up and sown into the sea. I do not know what a soul is, I think of it as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she is wild now with it, she touches and is touched by no one knows — down, or droppings of a common nighthawk, root of bird’s foot fern, antenna of Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was something deeply right about the physical elements — atoms, and cells, and marrow — of my mother’s body, when I was young, and now her delicate insignias receive the direct touch of the sun, and scatter it, unseen, all over her home. 2. cross and dove I had not wanted them, and I hadn’t known what to do with them, the minuscule symbols of my mother’s religion, I looked for a crack in the stone floor of the cathedral but could not find one. Then I thought of the wilderness near Desolation, and asked my friend to carry them up to a peak of granite, and let the wind take them. Since then, it has been as if my mother’s spirit matter has been returned into the great bank of matter, as her marrow had been sifted down into the ocean. It doesn’t matter, now, if I ever wanted to disassemble my mother. The sixteenth-of-an-inch- across cross, and the silver line drawing of a dove are cached, somewhere, that is nowhere to be found. Now I think of the nature of metal, and how long the soul-dolls of her trust will last in their spider-egg-sac of roots, needles, quartz, feathers, dust, snow, shed claw. Her belief she would have an eternal life was absolute, I think. It would not be good to think of my mother without her God — like a hermit howling in the moonscape of a desert. Once, when she was old — like an exquisite child playing a crone in the school play — we talked about heaven. She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she knew her father would be there, and her elder brother, and her second husband — maybe it was a heaven for four, the three men and her. It was so easy to make my mother happy in her last years, to tell her that I could just see her, as a kitten, in God’s lap, being petted. Her eyes sparkled with more beams than any other eyes I have seen. I have sent the tokens of her everlasting being into the high altitude. They will shine long after I can sing her — sing what I perceived through the distorted prisms of my vision. I don’t know if I saw my mother or did not see her. Day and night, her charms will gleam in the brush or stream, will reflect the mountain light in little pieces of unreadable language.