BRENT FISK

I ask my mother how she flies in dreams

but she says she never flies. Once, a dream
where marigolds blossomed from her feet, another
where she gave birth to the sun. She stirs
her coffee and looks out the window. Your father sleeps
with a leg thrown across my shins.

I tell her that I fly as if falling.
In one dream I’m trapped like a bird deep inside
the earth, and some stone statue’s come to life,
chases me through the underworld.

My mother nods though she doesn't know it.
Small feathers of connection line a nest of sleep.
I look at her thin hips, can’t imagine her giving birth to the sun.
The moon she could raise as her own, but the sun she would abandon
on the stoop of a pale country church,
go home to bed an hour early, say
Hail Mary full of grace until Father came to bed,
one heavy leg thrown across her body
tethering her to this life they share.