Waxworks
1.
My mother wanes under the burning penumbra
of the waxing October moon, walking away
the high tide of sweetness in her blood,
diabetes, like the name of a constellation
believed to influence a daily life,
twin poles yanking her high and low,
always on the cusp of transformation
into platonic Jekyll or grinding Hyde.
I lose sight of her as the sound of the word
rises, a prayer for a syringe of magic,
a cure, though I know she has no rush of hope,
living with a fix, which, in truth, fixes nothing.
Today, amid the woods stripped of leaves,
we cut stems of the bittersweet,
plump dull-red arils under orange caps,
waxworks bobbing near barbed wire,
avoiding the woody nightshade
that is true bittersweet, its heart-shaped leaves
like the fist in the chest, no lovely valentine
cloistered over ill-formed fruit of poisonous scarlet,
the color of blood from her fingertip
when a quick blind stab draws it out.
2.
In the dew of the evening, I envision her walking,
the switch of her form turning darkened spears of grass
into light, as if all particles from celestial bodies
which have fallen to earth, absorbed by plant and sod,
had come back to life, radiant in their resurrection.
With everything once June-fat now fall-shorn
by the wind, I am braced by her beauty,
the elegance of her strain, the ornament of bare form,
the melodic evocation in her conversation,
and in my heart, both the fist in chest
and the place of mirth and remorse,
I feel the twisted waxworks unwinding,
fingers nested in the palm uncurling,
see how thin trees look without leaves
defined in the twilight by the merest of moon,
depleted, but no longer in need.
• • •
Jeff Burt lives in California with his wife amid the redwoods and two-lane roads wide enough for one car. He works in mental health. He has work in Bird’s Thumb, The Nervous Breakdown, Spry, Terrene, and Young Raven’s Review. He was the featured poet in the 2015 summer issue of Clerestory, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review narrative poetry prize.