The Separation
She pours out a pool of red paint
and with a white paper straw
between her lips she blows
the shapes of trees.
When her two boys blow too
at what she starts, they will form
a red forest. I am trying to picture this
from what she has told me.
Now she has returned to otherness,
and when she calls she will say
she was up more than once
rubbing Abrams’s small legs
that ache from playing too hard.
The moon is unearthed
over Avenue C. It rises
over her father’s white truck
and over the old elementary school
with white paper faces.
It rises over the church with a hole
burnt through the roof
and the Mother of God, who did not move
from mildness where she stood
in flames that grew like a forest.
It’s hard to rave so much
as if the flames were blown into us.
This is the moon in spring
in the city. It should be a parting
from recklessness into sleep.
