Things which will not appear in this lullaby

                                  

                         Three poems by Traci Brimhall

Family Portrait as Lullaby

Your father is the slow dance and I am the ballad.

Or he's the nightclub and I am six tequila shots on the bar.

I am the salt and lemon, too.

I am the snake and the apple. I am the tongue that says

to your father – Take. Eat. Do this in remembrance of me.

Your father, the monologue in the music box

and I, the plastic ballerina in gold shoes.

Your father is the swaddle, the rock, the cradle.

His potbellied heart loses its socks and is learning to laugh.

You are Mars. Your father and I are its two moons orbiting.

You, stardust on the telescope's lens

and the ice in the comet's tail.

Your heart is a poppy – bright, forgetful

You are the first mayapple of spring, unripe and rising.

And this is the hallelujah I asked the first stardust to sing at the quickening.

This is the dirty Eden, stalked by envious angels,

This is the land of Isaac, and of knives.

Things Which Will Not Appear in This Lullaby

This cast iron cradle on an overburdened bough.

That stone doll with a quartz heart and agates for eyes.

A boy waving a red skirt at a girl pawing the street

         in patent leather shoes.

A pirate ship circled by a shark that feeds on moonlight.

Mermaids training with tridents.

Instead I'll sing about a kelp[ forest caressing a glass-bottomed boat

        or wild ponies bathing in a starlit river.

Your father, his sweater held open like a sling weighted with pears.

Your father, anointing my wrist with a paper corsage.

My love, the fourth-longest river in the world.

Someone else's love, between the road and the woods,

Not Job's first loss or his forty-eighth, but his wife swaddling

        the second set of sons she'd been given to replace the ones

        God had taken.

Neither never, nor Neverland, but always and here.

 

Lullaby with Almost All the Answers

The bridesmaids in yellow silk harvesting

pears is when. Love set you going is why.

One third of the spirit entering me is why.

Moonlight gentling the curtains is how.

The angel Gabriel is who. The husband is who.

The stranger next to me on the bus who let me

warm my hands on her thighs is who. We all

want to be broken for each other is why.

We all want to kiss our names from someone

else's mouth is why. The tongue is where.

Neck is where. Collarbone, nipple, and nave

are where. Why: winter approached and heat

was scarce or the fourth glass of wine or old-

fashioned loneliness. My blood on the white flesh

of the bitten apple is what. I wanted a child

to live long enough to call me mother is why.

From Poetry Northwest, Winter and Spring 2015.