January 12, 2022 - From our archives - Tom Davidson’s “Darius Azmeh-Volpato” - Issue No. 3 - Winter 2017-18

Darius Azmeh-Volpato
Tom Davidson

Mama, you are beautiful as a wraith.
Every morning the world shoots
Out of your corpse under
the wan light of winter
near where the children in the playground dismantle
daisies and hum sweet tunes
to the scarred ants and squelchy pond critters,
out of you gushes the plain windows,
knee-high fences, succulent lawns,
all your astonishing pages unbound,
whispered with intention on down
pillows late at night
when the ashes of our sleeping turn
back to body to fern to ocean jelly again,
and from the crevices in your bones seedlings hover
one hundred fold over children
and beleaguered school administrators
who long to retreat to your painted summer shacks
and attend to the drift of dandelions,
to stand before the coming season and wait in luxury
for the puffed-up owls, slippery foxes, and the mama wolf,
while city life motors on happy in its nature
walloping with clubs the treasured stories, coughing up
a lung defending the drone from the podium, too skittish
to pause for breath, not dwelling on the white sheet
an orderly once placed over your body, Mama –
the one woman who is unseen but heard whose
words alight even on steel girders, with so much love
to give I want to be as open as your body is
with its bulbous sockets out of which grow blazing lilies,
as open as we all want to be when we’re not snarling in time
with the beating heart of the beast scratching the ages on tombstones.