Poem Without My Mother

We are still clawing Spring from Winter’s clasp,
when I tell you I dreamed my mother, how she hard-

scrabbled a mound of scree; greyed harting. Stones, 
that might have pinned a house upright once, before 

the waters (tumult, thaw). I cannot say more than this: 
that she held to her, at the hinge of her body, a child; 

an infant with legs as fat as seals & feet, webbed 
as the Blackfeet Maw when he hungers the bog.

Or was it her hands? My mother’s hands, re-settling
slipped earth, redeeming it from the diffident hunger

of deluge. What is it we witnessed the night she died?
A burning house? A forest warped with rage in the cloaking 

dark? That the more than one thousand rains have come 
is certain. But they cannot wash my mother to me; un-fade

the auburn, which haloed her. Fireweed. Glisk. What remains?
A newling lamb, balanced on a hip of the Voar. The haunch—

below where her heart had been.