Jovi Schnell, Willow Wishes (acrylic flashe, and cell vinyl on canvas), 2015
When
my daughter asks
if I’ll remember
this twilight, purpling leaves lacing
her hair, cricket
murmur, I can’t say: You don’t know
what you’re asking. No,
this is my failing—
soon I won’t recall
the day-ending light’s shift
on your face bones,
here, now. I’ve forgotten
to buy you a new
toothbrush again. The search
for God, he sounds
like stars, she says, is deadly—
which is more brutal,
to enter him
& be entered, or to enter
& be changed forever? Coming
back through this door
(she uncoiled
my body) after tasting
the Lord makes a person
skittish—you unhinge: sleep
in a tub, eat
bread baked on cow
dung, drink dish
water, carry an ever-
lit lamp searching
for just one honest
person. How St. Xenia wore her husband’s
name & clothing
after he died, sleeping
in a field to keep
him alive. How the search for my daughter’s
doll ended
in finding only the tiny
silken slippers
under a bush. We believe
the earth’s made just for us.
Then, it shatters.
God bless the dead’s
ecstatic nestle
in rain’s
choir
—how fool am I for lifting
my moon-eyed daughter
away from an earth
where maggots clean
a felled fawn’s
skull among lilies, excising
a wound
from the inside out? Where my body
also unburdened—
sliding out my blood-
bodied firstborn,
love’s glisten.
Where we live among
everything that’s dying,
where I still begin the poem,
Child fit in my hip
bones, she’s the wildflower I float
in water, small saint ripping
each petal from the stalk
with her teeth.