Mingle-Tongue by Karen Douglass

Her hands found the fire, pulled
tales from chimney soot, so she did.
No one can burn this family down,
not while she still knows the stories
about rhubarb and sugar maples,
fires and filling up the woodbox,
Stella Dallas on the radio, the whip-poor-will,
cellar, woodshed, carriage house, barn,
back stairs, orchard. She knows everything
about the bleeding heart bush, the privy,
timothy, tongues of blue-flag iris, honey suckle,
apple blossom, bindweed. Like barn swallows,
her stories fly, wild as a kid?s cry,
urgent as a chimney fire.
Her wide thumbs push me into place.
Thumbs like turtle heads--snap, snap.
My face is in her hands.

The stories are about all of us,
stitches in the hem of my eyebrow
--one word, one red stitch,
faded rick-rack scar--all the ways
we could be bad, a fluid-driven Dodge,
the baby born broken, the bones and
joints of our clan. We like salt and bile.
We won?t tell you why till it?s too late.
Double wedding rings, a starched soul,
still buttering her toast to the bitter edge,
today she?s robed and waiting
--holding tight to a string named
Life-in-this-world, wiser
about the ways a body misbehaves,
how cells fall out of luck.
Makes me break that she can die.
My face is in her hands.