Kathleen Ellis

Always on Sunday

The afternoons seem longer
since the death of my mother’s body.

Early Exile

As soon as the B is mentioned,
I am excused from penmanship
(even though I've been practicing

the letters over and over again)
and shrink
in the strangeness of myself.

By the time the O is out of his mouth,
I'm out the classroom door
in a flurry that hovers like chalkdust.

When the hard D is sounded
I am hidden in a corner of the library,
learning the names of the cetaceans.

After the Y erupts into thin air
and I have changed shapes
with whatever is largest and most visible

on this earth, I swim out to where the current
carries us and wonder why
(that unremitting Y)

in this world of soft, rounded vowels
and consonants you can swallow,
I can't have one too.

Houseguest

Your shadow is behind the door.

It has traveled clear across the country
from spring to winter—tracking its muddy boots
into the entryway.

I wish I could clean up after you.
It’s startling
the way it sees right through me—

At first it thinks I am your sister
but I have no sisters—

Maybe it is trying to exchange warmth
the way mammals do—

Even now it’s stepping out of the shadow
groping its way back into light—
not as a body, but fractal, rough at the edges.

It is now standing at the end of the bed.
It is pleading for water.

The Birds

Sometimes the birds don’t hear me.
Sometimes I stand under their trees
and shake the lowest branches, singing
their own songs back to them,
mixing them up with rhymes I learned
in childhood. Sometimes I stir the pond
and the fish don’t notice, down there
they know I’m up above, hiding
behind this prism of refraction.
I feel the undertow of water on my face,
the dispersal of light, the plaza, all things
that come to me wherever I turn my head.
What a small thing I become,
What a faint breath flying back into the body.

The Undertow

Into the Mexican sea I go wading in the surf.

I see the trawlers bobbing close to shore,
and the ocean with nothing above it

but pelicans swooping and tipping their wings
along the ridge of the waves.

I want to be air, or water—to be at ease
in the undertow, but in the world
this is the case:

the waves tumble me like a stone.

Two Mothers: A Brief Exegesis
Of My Life As A Christian Scientist

After Mrs. Eddy fell on the ice
in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1866
she “doubled up like a jackknife.”

Two days later, she arose and walked.
This is the story the mother told:

“Mind is All; Matter is not Mind;
therefore Matter does not exist.”
So in the beginning, we had two mothers.

The first was a body without a head.
The other, a head estranged from the body.
And mother number one believed

in number two, each day
retreating into her room of silence
and then returning as a ghost.

This is the matter that still endures:
we hear it pounding in our temples.

This is the mother who denied the world,
And this is the other we called Mummy.

Wooden Fish

In San Blas,
among the venders
of peanuts and phony opals,
we met the angel of commerce
working the streets
in her tight red sweater.
Only eight, she allows
the American women tourists
to fondle her sweater
and call her sweetheart.
But she’s been around,
a nomad of the beach towns—
hawking her armload
of handcarved, wooden fish.

She circles the square,
darting from bench to bench
with her magical fish.
But we see a skinny girl
who wants to proposition us,
And we know that look is bait
to keep herself alive.
For a few hundred pesos,
she hands us a wooden fish
with a turquoise moon
carved on one side
and a coyote on the other.

Day after day,
she sells us more fish—
first, a chartreuse mermaid
swishing her tail, and here
is a fish with a white rabbit
bobbing on a sea of pelicans.

In the end, we acquire
a whole school of fish,
and we buy a trunk to fit them.
We call it our aquarium,
and I try to remember
how we came to this place
with nothing, wanting to be
free of baggage. But what
of these fish, bleeding their
luminous colors into a trunk
that cost us almost nothing?