Jean Howard

To My Mother's Ghost

Winter is twisting
inside and out of its skin,
the raw underbelly
of scrub oak pricking
through open pores
of dirt.

Clouds are tormented
into swollen limbs
of light.
Severed, they float slowly,
slowly, in a pool
of blue.

Why can’t I swallow,
or eat,
or sleep?
Your chandelier is laughing
at the icy poverty
of melting snow,
at the agate bead
of birds stitched to
exposed ground, its soggy
nape.

Light slides off the mountains
into filling furrows
of shadow,
which will
overcome in minutes.

This day, once owned
by the living, slips, their patterns
now disappearing too,
as spring is willing
to swallow these months
of strife, of deer
hoofing frantically for lavender
tucked deep in comas
of snow,

Of moose stretching
hooves up
into arching galaxies
of sleeping cottonwood,

Of you, like a pearl
in enamel, the soft pink
sheath that we sealed
with a mortician’s twist,
his hands skilled
at levers of this sort.