Resurrection
My father’s faith he saved
for her bright flannel skirts
and a ‘58 Dodge Sierra
on a side trip to a Mount
with a borrowed name.
He said she needed a break
wearing a heart
buried in dark concerns
on the edge of roads
laid by lives she’d left behind
So we found one in line on our trip:
Just a gravel road
that wrapped its way crunching
under dusty tires to the top.
Pike’s Peak! Pike’s Peak!
he kept repeating, his inside joke
just a lie,
just an elbow bending up from the lake
but in our eyes a boot heel less than Everest.
The wagon hung its belly to the road
loaded like a Conestoga
with pregnant suitcases and as much mint
three boys could stuff into it.
Along the way, dressed in Easter
she plucked ripe cherries from an elvish basket
and twisting around popped them
1-2-3
into our gaping mouths
like communion wafers.
We begged sweet ruby hearts
from her fingers to the top
spitting pits
into our blood-stained palms.
And at the peak we poured out,
scattered seeds to the ground,
and swam our eyes
eastward over the unbound blue
called Michigan.
The wind grew cold off the lake
that late
so I leaned into a flannel skirt
looking for fingers,
satisfied in sharing my father’s faith
and in resurrecting a mother’s
ruby red heart.
Nesting in Danapur
Here
in Danapur
cafés of crippled chairs
claim the yearly
Here
we baptize ritual opinions
in assam tea
whose black and bitter
honesty anchors moments
we sometimes wish to end.
Here
where the white winged jhongils nest
again in the high sal trees,
“like snowdrifts in the green”
you said to me yesterday.
But I wasn’t there. I was off in play with
careless boys kiting across a field.
“Aren’t they lovely” you appealed
for the nesting birds.
But that wasn’t me who heard you.
I was tethered to a fist
suspended in the wind
and captured in one lifting moment
too high to ever land.
Richard Kurtz has published several poems and essays in various journals, including the North Carolina Literary Review. His latest work, “Star Sapphire” can be found at Splash of Red. He is the director of an English school in Asia and graduated with a Masters in Literature from East Carolina University in ’98.
