Ephemerals

Climbing the Cataract Falls Trail
We don’t notice the drop-offs much,
The abyss. Only the flowers, tiny and pale
With big leaves, and ferns, working
Backward from the reservoir up cataract to cataract,
Chasing time backwards
The closer we get to sky.

Once, our 14-year-old
Twirled away from us
Toward the sea, and I was happy.
Your mother’s tumor grew itself
From seed, from darkness.

I thought the ephemerals would be gone—spring turns
With such speed into heat, white
Slender-star Solomon glistening
With water drops from fog
Or rain. Only higher up did night-purple hounds’ tongue
Appear, and then canyon delphinium, orange-red
Like firecrackers, delicate flames.

Once, your mother joked
About how the EMTs had called her
A senior in distress, how she pushed us to joke
The way home, no matter how dark.

We climb until we reach rainforest,
Only ghosts of trees, half-hidden,
Fog turning to rain. The top
Of Mount Tamalpais: open
Meadow, haunted with no picnics
At dinner-hour. A long trail back

And I realize I have smooth soles.
And all the people who rushed
To the top are slipping too,
Tired, holding on to one another.
I only slipped once before I held to you

The canyon below yawning
To broken piles of trees lodged in water,
To cold raw water rushing. The cataracts
Spilling time, my parents
Back with our girls.

Your mother was small
But bright in the dark on video chat,
Glad you were awake on the coast,
Joking on a first-name basis with her nurse,
The creeping florescent lights
From the hallway another kind of moonlight,
And then suddenly she had to go—

On the way down, checkered lilies
We hadn’t noticed, pink in the gloom
Like lone lanterns, drops sliding.
She died just before we could travel.
We get into the last car parked
Under dank redwoods.

Ads Targeting a Blue Dragon Sea Slug

Is your old neck making you look old?
Tears never feel as though they’re enough,

Do they? Always bottom-heavy, and evaporating.
I can’t help I’m venomous as the blue dragons

Washing up on Texas beaches from the gulf
By the changing climate. I’m just bitter.

Beautiful as a shooting star or alien hawk
From another planet, six wings beating. Metallic

And electric blue painted onto something
We can’t imagine thoughts from, blown

From pelagic loitering upside down to your shore.
Are your abs flat? Good, because my jelly

Pooch is looking stellar, and I need a foil.
You will know if I have stung you.

It will feel like needles all over;
You will not ignore me. Tell me

I look pregnant or look great with that weight loss,
Nine out of ten doctors agree

I’m both sexes and often pregnant. I’m always
Dressed to impress, never bother to

Get on top of laundry and stay on top,
Back bending both ways like an interstellar gymnast,

With my shimmering indigo cerata
Wings. And I eat the darkest blue of men o’ war.

Photo by Alexandra Diaconu on Unsplash