“I Consider My Mother’s Mind”

Stars of the Great and Small Bears, lost in a cobalt padlock above Detroit, the orient coruscations of car factories, skating ponds, six-lane highways, now lumbering across decades into my childhood suburb, that rimed ruin— picnic table, dispirited shucks and obeisant leeks of our winter garden, homunculus at the mind’s edge—I can’t return to you, though I believe you’re calling me from the polar house of hibernal fear with its skirted vanity table, its angry mirror & Bakelite brush, bristles up, still fleeced with a child’s hair, a wavering frequency in the key of oblivion, mammalian, contracting.