Moonglow
a poem
On the fourteenth page of Craigslist
I go back to the 1950’s pioneer resort
on whatever summer day
of the years I see now as youth
when my mother’s mother Ada Bea snuck around to the empty cabins
to scavenge for better dishes, knives, and pots than ours had
Once or twice we got lucky and found shimmering white plates:
when held in the July sun,
they twinkle and refract light
So we called them rainbow dishes
and looked for them every year like treasure
at the bottom of the green cypress river there
She was a renegade if she was awake,
scaring up ways to get the deputies called to the house
(once for threatening an electrician with a gun she did not possess
if he touched her flowers),
cackling at pissing off the neighbors,
luring the armless man over to whisper about God-knows-what
She dyed my teenage best friend’s hair blue
and spiked the Baptist punch with some kind of brown pantry liquor
just to giggle in the corner
and not drink any;
in the Clinton years she called the White House to complain
more regularly than the Speaker,
she said they knew her there
When my friend jumped off a building one Christmas
she gave me a singing bear to sleep with;
She insisted on fireworks for New Years,
as sparklers danced across her granite canyon face
and she believed an angel lived in the blurry corner
of her bedroom closet mirror
Even alive she seemed fictional,
too storied to be less than a caricature
Now gone, she lingers
adjacent to my periphery
I want her life — its rage and delight and ferocity and vibration —
to mean more than
that she was once alive
and now is not
She was no Betty Friedan,
she could not go out and be just anything
so she became outlandish, a Southern anecdote,
a meal with too much red pepper;
a rainbow dish scavenger.
I wish I had asked her
who else she might have been
if her druthers
had been hers
