My Boyfriend’s Mother

She looked at me as though I had just
presented her with a box of screws and rusted metal bits
or still-wrapped light fixtures and said
“This is your grandson,” and she wasn’t fooled.
She looked over at my boyfriend as if wondering how I could have gotten pregnant
when I was so obviously sleeping with the vacuum cleaner
or with one of the passing school buses or garbage trucks I was always flirting with.
Her expression said I should have been more careful
installing the dishwasher, shouldn’t be laying this at the feet
of her innocent, helpless, human son.

Later, my boyfriend said his mother had had her doubts
about the whole thing, as did he, who knows where I’d been
what I’d done when his back was turned. I could have lovers hiding in the back yard
buried beneath the rotting piles of leaves, or the old furniture piled in the alley
canoodling when I’d said I was gardening, could have a secret lover
curled up always under the house, waiting for our rendezvous
living solely on the pot I knew my boyfriend had hidden there.

Perfect

I don’t know anything about cars. I just know
how to reduce a section of jointed and bolted metal
to a shoebox full of meaninglessness
with just a wrench and a screwdriver,
just the right size to bury in the garden
in the light of a full moon, and with a muttered prayer.

You don’t know anything about women. You do
know how to bait a fishhook
with earthworms and cyanide, light candles
set a table, pour cocktails of antifreeze and absinthe
get the dog to take the blame
for whatever dead things happen in this house.

The Thing that Keeps Me

My earliest memory is of crawling to the edge of a cliff
and seeing nothing but pink and blue clouds beneath me
spreading so thick and solid they looked capable of holding me.
My mother said she almost lost me that first camping trip
in the Grand Canyon, she says she thought I was asleep
and she turned her back for just a moment, just a moment
and I was almost gone. She says this is why
I’m so afraid of heights now, that my frantic parents’ reaction
to my explorations of that cliff edge
must have scarred me for life.

But in these memories of myself
crawling quickly and purposefully toward my certain death
I am full of giddy, infantile delight, and I don’t remember
The terror of my parents’ disapproval, the panicked screaming
and understandable overreacting
which surely must have ruined the rest of that morning.
Even now, when my stomach lurches when I step
too close to a railing, or stop at some scenic overlook
there’s a small part of me that’s convinced that
instead of falling, I am meant to fly
And the steady, adult reasoning that keeps me from testing this theory
from hurtling over the edge and into the air
is tenuous at best.

In Closing

I imagine them finding her on the beach
blond hair spread out on the sand, skin pale and taut
the water pooling in a foamy halo around her head
eyes fixed unblinking on the early morning sun.
I don’t think about the crabs and seagulls

that must have surely found her before the first pair of joggers
stumbled across her in their morning run
and whatever other damage that must have occurred
from being battered about by the waves before being
hurled up on shore. I close my eyes

against the curt voice on the phone
methodically ticking off the contents of her pockets
the jewelry she was still wearing, the description of a tattoo
I never knew about
and instead, think of angels on Christmas trees, tiny, wings spread
half-remembered psalms, shattered lectures of Heaven.