for Terri Acevedo
What is love but feasting atop a grave?
Mother's Day and the Catholic cemetery is packed
with barbeques, Mariachis and plastic
tablecloths laid for picnics. There, alone
with his hands pressed into a burial mound
and in the cool shade of a concrete angel's wings,
a boy sits crosslegged. He could be a yogi
concentrating on the orderly column of black ants
that carry, one blossom at a time, yellow
mesquite flowers to their eggs underground, except
that it's Mother's Day, and he is as alone
as he'll ever be, staring at the empty curl
of his fingers holding nothing but
the distant mourning of doves.
At desert noon even the dead enjoy
singing that braids heat waves
shimmering molten lead between spring blooms.
My friend has come to speak to
her mother riding the spirit horse of memory
along an underground river this past year.
She lights a candle and brushes debris
with her tender palms from the ant-tilled soil
above her mother's ghost face.
Walking between graves, her skin fills
with a guitar's laughing blue chords,
with charcoal smoke,
with the boy's mute hands,
with loneliness spun by hot wind each afternoon
under the invisible birth of stars, where
the dead begin to remember their names.