Picture of My Mother

Picture of My Mother

Not-quite-black and not-quite-white,

an image of one I’d not yet met

lights up like a castle cellar's candle

flame inside me when I see, see

it in its red-wood frame, the way I see

a mountain's blue mystery

from the land’s edge at UBC,

haunting me in my haunt

on Cecil Green’s green glowing

with earth-truth in the purple heavens,

the Strait water, moving, still, between us,

always holding hidden life, always

upholding a vessel or two, always

called into by birds landed and singing,

or crying, or with the ruah

of their wings while in flight.

•

I am she, inside her, a sixteen-year-old

old soul whose dreaming cells

haunt my blood and flow from me

as colour into dreams unfinished,

dreams unfleshed, into years of absent

flesh, the absent voice echoing in

the orange sun's evening flames

held over west-winded waters

in a framed still: surrender –

not in cellular form, yet, and yet there now,

there then, a presence creatured present

by the camera’s captured light,

the light in the meaning of her name,

the light in the yellow warmth

of my flaming longing glowing

from a house window at night.