—for my mother

Nights we liked best: you banked the coals
and told stories, us blonde-headed girls
wide-eyed, wrapped in blankets, the space

between us temporarily closed. Wind leaned
its shoulder against the tent's walls,
light and noise sifted in from the fearsome night:
decoy calls of owls, rain-swollen creek.

The tent too thin to protect or barricade,
more like a membrane—
the world came in. Your stories filtered out.

It was the one time we saw your limbs
loosen, hair tied back—no hairspray or high heels—
the one time we glimpsed what you had been as a girl,
mind filled with books and trees,

before jobs you took for necessity and suppers
you scrapped from charity unwilded your heart.

Mornings we loved, too, when you stirred coals
from the ashes and sparked, without a match,
the new day's fire.