Going
BY MARK IRWIN
Mother, draped in black on the basement stairs, that’s how
I found her, getting off my bike, approaching
home in the dark, opening a series of doors to her
there. What’s wrong? I asked, thinking it was my father’s
death. She looked up through the stratums of shadow, pitch—smiled,
then spoke in a language of whisper and slur I could only
feel, not know. When her father died, to soothe her mother,
Marie, she asked me to go kiss Grandpa George, and I did,
running like an athlete from the sidelines to the coffin, placing
my lips on his cold cheek. Now, looking into Mother’s face
I’m looking into a well, its channeled dark gathering
water’s far trickle—voices of other dead—where a glint
holds diminished sky. Why? She seems to ask, holding up
a white thumb whose prick of blood lights for a moment
all the hours, years—its call colored like the fire truck her
father drove, its red going scarlet, carmine, rouge, coral—
a tiny flag, kerchief, windless save in the spring of our minds.
Avalanche
BY MARK IRWIN
Red blood cells
magnified 5000 times
frozen in their tranced
tumbling from the heart’s
forest, erythrocytes,
scarlet, sensing life—
blonde hair streaming
from a convertible, cotton
candy torn by a mouth,
scent of parsley after
rain, wrens chattering on
the power line, each
of the senses opening. Yes,
these juxtaposed against
the live-feed of cars
drifting through the Eisenhower
Tunnel, or infrared of deer
crossing White Creek makes
you want a feral
word—elk—that one
turning its rack under
ordinal stars—hooves
over talus, clacking the way
any good consonants
will in the avalanche
of language. A nursery
school class chanting
their ABC’s in chorus,
or babel of that evangelist.
I prefer eros, that other,
older red cloth
where if lucky
sometimes we lie
blurred. The glory of those
moments camping, pointing
toward Venus to make
ourselves unbound, as
when I took the wrinkled,
reaching hand of that
chimpanzee in mine
and we both looked
woken from a spell.
