Combing
Predawn, by wonder’s dome light
alone, I comb the moss fern leaf twig
scruff beneath a cedar in Saratoga Woods
where after enough rain those golden
chanterelles appear like tiny moons
around their planet that immense trunk
about now each year. I visit the chill
mist, its mulch-smells, crouch-ache,
quiet thrill of a small basketful—here
I comb the dark again on my hunt
for the comfort.
It’s just that after all—
no actual cold of the earth licking
the bones in my feet as damp seeps
through my socks, no wind on my cheek
as I stand to ease the bum hip, no real
taste of pan-roasted morsel. But I comb
a wide host of preserves these nights,
zones where I feel for something
believable,
where I find my mother
the schoolgirl, and her mother combing
the child’s golden-brown hair, the two
in a closeness kept by eyes not meeting
in that vanity mirror, the tortoiseshell
teeth stroking tender scalp…love’s
test as the comb catches a knot,
and will the beleaguered mother stop
to press out the tangle, rolling that silk
between thumb and forefinger, only
then to pull through without one yank
at a root . . . .
I don’t know how it went,
a century ago in a coalmining town
where the Alleghenies sliced flash floods
from the bellies of clouds, and the miners’
wives glared at a little Christ-killer, her
eyes big in thick scarlet-fever lenses
on that narrow nose, and her chanterelle
hair—
but I comb, and imagine
you must, for belonging’s loose ends . . . .
I’ll fly back to that cedar’s mesh, twisted
low limbs like ropes with no sense
what they were thrown for. Or I’ll shuffle
hope’s sparkling dust where it’s rippled
across a field of what was, or on hands
and knees under a half-moon, in my own
shadow, where I must’ve dropped
the keys.
Combing for what I can savor,
or retrieve of trust—for the pleasure
I seem to remember as my mother speaks
songlike of those sure hands
drawing her hair back firm…. Was it
such soothe, or does one memory cover
another, like the tan camouflage strewn
over the dirt I drag my nails through
on this forest floor in the air?
I know—
entire legions of men are out combing
towns they’ve just battered, poking
through miles of rubble for last morsels
of their own disavowed tenderness
to root out and kill, for that inverse
comfort they’ve learned.
It is still so
dark, no matter my eyes are open
or closed, I comb those men’s souls now.
God they’re knotted, and beleaguered
in my way, I tend to tug, as I might
a chanterelle, only to tear the fragile
root threads—then I won’t understand
this human memory web, their trouble,
how they, like my mother
in her way,
lost gentle.
Innisfree 42
A Closer Look: