Sestina for my Mother

Mama always told me that if I wanted to see change

in this world I'd have to make it, either with Howitzer

or love song, or a “To Whom IT May Concern” mailed

to whomever it might. Sunday nights she would braid

her hair in the kitchen, hot comb on stove, cookie jar

bassist walking blues while I kept time with a tapping heel.

I frolicked barefoot outside so often that my heels

grew to be at least an inch thick; season's change

forced me inside so my protection grew thin. Cookie jars

fall from time to time, but this one, it seemed, a howitzer

had shelled; the shards in my sole were so fine, braided

gauze so tightly bound, prints so red on forgotten mail.

Afternoons, home from school, I would always check the mail

hoping for packages I never ordered. After surgery, as she healed

I would part her hair, learning on the fly to plait and braid,

and apply oil to her scalp, or comb it, generally in exchange

for a long hug or two. She complimented it, noting how it sure

was a nice Mother's Day gift in tandem with the new cookie jar.

It's a ring of black faces, high atop the cabinets, 37 cookie jars.

The first was a gift, the rest marked fragile, arrived by mail.

She takes care to avoid duplicates, but accepts banal gifts anyhow. It's her

passion, or one of them; she paints rooms, shapes landscapes, heals

her babies when their ills wear them down, speeds down interchanges,

and loves, and loves. When I was eleven she taught herself to braid

because my hair required it, and when Jordan followed suit, she braided

his too. She has never had much taste for cookies, despite all the cookie jars,

but never hesitated to stock up on Oreos or whatever our wildly changing

appetites demanded. We had a dog that never learned to pee outside or heel,

but soothed his butt-itches on the carpet and sprinted to gnaw at a piece of mail

we had the misfortune of dropping; Mama looked at him with Howitzer

eyes ready to detonate every time he invaded. She explained how it's her

space he destroys when he shits in the closet or eats the armchair-fringe braid.

I once took her to get a pedicure, hoping Ms Kim would trim stress as she scraped heel:

stress accumulated from years of being the only woman in a house of male

patten blindness so advanced that all we can think to get her is a cookie jar

at holidays; these are usually duplicates. One of these days I'll make a change,

be old enough to heel myself with love and wisdom like a howitzer,

change from idiocy to appreciation, generosity, subtlety somehow braided

together, fragile as a cookie jar, but impenetrable, clad in chain mail.