The Hope Within

You’d never know it by looking at my hands

roots of blue veins trailing

but dreams flutter here

hummingbirds hovering over these keys.

Dare I tell you?

I saw him staring

the shaven-head solider

still a boy in his mother’s eyes

Mine, too.

The leg crunches hardening belly into aluminum washboard–

that Aunt Cil used to scrub dirt from Lon’s socks

–yawned him.

On the third mile of a walk that took me nowhere

I caught him staring

He smiled that grin that boys give women their mama’s ages

But I saw past the smile, to the wincing

He thinks my dreams vanished

with the eggs I once plopped

with the routine of assembly line chocolates.

Dare I tell him?

She tilts her slinky neck back

stretching her ostrich chin

This will give you Gumby skin

won’t wrinkle

Try it, she says.

But I know only surgery can fix what ails her now

Seeing her mama’s face falling

pantyhose whose elastic has come undone.

In the rearview mirror

she sees me the way she wants to remember me

through blue eyes

dreaming

Of walking into the doctor’s office

seeing a farmer with the book suspended

four inches from the nose that he got from his daddy’s

not his mama’s side of the family.

So lost he doesn’t look up

doesn’t notice when the nurse calls out my name

it is the same one on the spine

Of the book he is reading.