Michael Boccardo
WHY MY MOTHER SPEAKS OF DEER
because joy because hooves & speckled backs the flare
of a tail tipped white because the field & the woods beyond
the field risk giving up such stillness such elegance
& without each nimble step there would intrude an echo an absence
before the tremble & the spill like color from the lip
of a painter’s tube she speaks because the sky softens
rinses clean the hours & with them her memory where shadows
need a body a self some reason for being & the strangeness housed
inside her mouth is now not a name but the idea
of a name rust-warped & twisted by what the wind leaves behind
because night is a bloated black tongue learning to pray again
because the cruel ceremony of moon & stars click too quick
into place my mother speaks of deer because everything
must end everything must starve until all that shows are the bones
of old photographs because her life is a well
culled from antler & thicket a well doe-eye dark into which she lowers
the vessel of her own forgetting so she may lift
what resembles haunch then flank then fleece the tender spell
spun soft between palm & pulse because survival
is spare is reticent a sequence receding like tracks tendering down
a trail an infinite lure toward home because home
is a bed of nettles wrought with every myth yet to be born
Michael Boccardo’s poems have appeared in various journals, including Kestrel, storySouth, Santa Clara Review, Mid-American Review, Iron Horse, The Maynard, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, and Best New Poets, as well as the anthologies Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose, and Art on HIV/AIDS and Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina. He is a four-time Pushcart Nominee and a finalist for the James Wright Poetry Award. He resides in High Point, NC, with three rambunctious tuxedo cats. Additional work can be found at www.michaelboccardo.com