Lean Enough

A small lizard
lifts his wise head
and eyes me basking
in early spring light.
He tastes the air
with his tongue,
slithers into the fern,
comes back.
I tell him
that his mother
was caught in the house,
that I raised her
from the dead
after months
behind the bookcase.
He tells me
that deprivation
feeds the soul,
little Desert Father
with his bulging gaze,
both of us
feasting on
the generosity
of the sun.
And I admit
that I carried her,
that’s all,
to the light and warmth
which will take us
both in the end
after we grow lean enough,
and loose,
and unafraid.

Belly Dancing

I was onstage reading
poems about my lost
family in Russia
before the dancers came on.
The Wild Blue Yonder cafe,
glasses clinking, espresso
machine drowning the words.
The audience clapped politely,
none of us knowing real
hunger, suppers of boiled
rats, or walking barefoot
in the blinding snow.

It’s an ancient art,
the dancers say, hips
swinging, navels swirling
as the belly muscles undulate.
Tambourines and wailing
melodies celebrate the bared
and severed connection to
our mothers. Or is it loss,
the way we are set free
to drift and seek
our own salvation?

My cousin laughed
remembering how he, a boy,
tried to make shoes
out of camel hair, twisting
and tying, two porous baskets
for his growing feet.

This music is in a minor key,
spare and open. Not enough
to hold us close, to keep out
the ice and snow.