These Hills

What they do not tell you about being a son
is that someday you’ll lift your mother out of necessity

& not know how to answer the deep ache in her

that refuses to leave from the botched surgery
on her four neuromas. They won’t mention the graft

of your skin on her skin you would give if it meant

her nerve cells might repair instead of defeat her
—their synapses flooded by the twice-daily pill

with a lyrical name that has strewn only wreckage

across her psyche for two decades so damaged
Achlys wouldn’t want them. Yes, a body can fade

& fragment in these hills like the green-veined

granite tumoring toward blossom, or a bloody
membrane between weeds & cedars. Hope was

a scalpel once. I could slide it across anything & be

healed completely was a dream she told me
repeats in her REM sleep. How do you

give someone who is burning permission

to vanish? Will she reincarnate as a gull
or the gray wave of foam a rogue hurricane

heaves up the local river with a serene quiet

worse than any crashing? How long have I been
still enough to witness it? This is grief. This is

seeing your mother suffer, & a wound made memory.

This is flame transforming: not a prayer but a fire
unquenchable covering our hands, our feet,

the neuromas clinging to our metatarsals

with a persistence so complete we feel no pain
stepping into the mansion in the sky

midnight is preparing. I collect every match

in its kitchen cabinets—scatter them
throughout each inch of this house

& its dry acreage in a dead galaxy

of black hole-filled pastures. I hear
a mockingbird calling her name as I strike

the first one & watch as it consumes the two

closest to it until there is a circuit of fire
connecting my lit skin to hers. Where a son

grieves a mother: a constellation. Where two bodies

meet failure: one crippling brilliance. I brighten 
where she does & darken where she does until

we cool to quartz, feldspar, mica, the bedrock

of this firmament no god could have sculpted
or made more imperfect, which is me holding her.