Colaterales/Collateral

by Dinapiera Di Donato

and step out

  unnoticed

  with a misleading calmness

  OUR LADY’S WILL

  After the civilian’s last sorrow

  there comes a time to clear the air

  I take charge of restoring my orchard

  scraping the varnish oxidizing on the pine boards

  some nights I remember my mother

  behind a verdaccio of missing flesh

  when she brings her gold in a red base to water

  and the engraved foils are sent to the automobile industry

  my mother, scroll-maker, gestures with her knife

  when she scrapes off meat and hair from these skins

  inscribed over and over again

  Ikebana’s gesture

  winter defeated by

  branches of forsythia

  and I wash her cut fingers with lists of the Ostracas

  scoring records on mollusks,

  where the unloved ones sign up

  palimpsests with laws erased for rewritten

  groundwork

  delirium a la carte, new visions, variations

  for the keepers of the world

  my mother guiding us down the road tosses me

  unto eternal life

  And I resume the wearing out of my hands

  by the work of living

  their dry lines

  a mummified nun

  to consecrate the shift

  dining on the best part of the fish

  its eyes

  The kings of the kitchen save

  the palate of the species

  Saint Lucia or Saint Theresa

  behind silver masks

  in a catafalque

  have scattered their pupils on a platter

  The blind girl in a sarcophagus of Venetian crystal

  with Orpheus as her guide

  arrives among 20-year-old tourists with rubber boots, defying

  high water, and he whispers into my ears that he is alone

  that the beasts

  inch closer every day

  I know his old story

  I plunge my hand to bring you light from home

  I kneel between your legs

  Only the eye of the cell phone vibrating

  I DON’T MEAN A JAPANESE LIFE, I MEAN MY MOTHER

  Chewing on my mother

  a late-morning blue bird sighted through the branches

  of Inwood with Alina

  pecking at her eyes of a hung woman

  I am not my mother’s raven

  my gaze ends beautiful and dark

  I am no longer the vulture’s fragrance or the idiot’s or my mother’s plea

  Alina leads me through a field of asphodel

  where my mother approaches

  leave her there,

  my creature,

  let your mother reign

  and keep going

  on your own