like Red Wing clay

Mary Ravlin Gould

SKIP-JUMPS

My mother moves toward silence now.

Short wobbly steps

like printemps stumps

of Red Wing clay remainders.  So

I follow along now, too.  Two lumps,

like those she spun once

on a wheel.  Immense

maypole of Mendelssohn skip-jumps –

the way Rembrandt became his painting

(like seaweed-coated plank

of slick driftwood, anch-

ored in sand).  Memory, fainting.

I used to topple to the ground

in school.  An epileptic

pine, almost.  A cryptic

minor character, utterly unfound –

unbound within some fictional expanse

of 19th-century steppe

sunburnt peace-pipe

smoky distances (autumnal trance).

We thread the needle in a mummer’s play.

Ariadne draws the skein –

Dante’s oriflamme ancien

Parisian labyrinth for Beatrice

Jessie Ophelia, remembering her father

Jackson Quick, the river-

pilot, sounding Mount Ever-

Rest (full fathom 5/29... 29...) – Mt. Purgatoire.

5.28.19