Poems of Memory

from a work in progress

     1.
The knife reduces a polished oval
to mimosa on the chopping board.
Out of the shell, day-old chicks tumble

like mimosa from their box onto the floor.
Animated egg-egg sacrificed!
My mother, or myself, scraping the board.

Only some forty years divide
these women. Time enough for her
to die. Almost my whole life

so far. And then, how much further?
How keen and clear these seventeenth-century
broodings make each everyday pleasure,

Everywoman's task. Her hands were ugly
with domestic scars, by which I remember them now
(mine are less scarred, less gentle) most exactly.
...