THE SOLARIUM

***

My mother found God in the desert sun.

Some would find that beautiful.

***

She believed what she had to,

Took what color she could,

From the church of stained-glass truths,

Back to the tent city under the overpass,

Painted torn canvas lean-tos with flickering light,

Cupped feebly in her blistered palms,

Slipping through gaps where her fingers wore thin.

***

Around her, cracked cement, all guttered with garbage,

Broke-down cars with spiderwebbed windshields,

Like a prison fence around the lot,

And barbed-wire eyes on the faces that passed—

White purses clutched tight, white children clutched tighter—

On their way to church and golden gates,

That would keep street trash out of Paradise.

***

It was a forgetting place,

Where proud brown peoples forced off their plains,

Died without a taste of deer,

And drug-rugged Mexicans misremembered names,

Of golden Mayan gods.

And my mother, she forgot her children, forgot herself,

Forgot everything but the Lord.

***

Her heart, her mind, her shaking legs,

Shattered open to receive His love.

Her only water, Savior’s wine.

Substance—just those paper wafers,

Dissolving to nothing on her tongue,

While roaches rustled in McDonalds wrappers cast aside,

By those who had enough.

***

For her, the earth held no oasis,

Held no palms outstretched to clasp,

Nor fanning overhead in shelter.

So, sweat-sick, mica-blind, and gasping,

She crawled away on burning knees,

Clawing at concrete until her fingernails,

Cracked.

***

She was looking for God, and in looking, she found,

A far too fragile truth;

Herself, a body, a human creature,

With falling blood on sizzling sand,

And the eyes of three white suns to guide her,

Wavering, dizzying, multiplied—

This false parhelion, her path to Heaven.

***

In her eyes, perhaps, the son and the spirit,

Sacred as the star who made them.

I hope she saw that and it gave her comfort,

For the transient,

The reflected,

The imagined, still,

Is real.

***

God scalded Himself through my mother’s frail flesh.

Some would find that beautiful.

***