Lightsey Darst // Poetry

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Bound

Who isn’t trying to fly home

today—even those who stand in their yards

hanging laundry, among the waving

arms of shirts,

have plotted courses. Standing

in her yard my mother, fifteen, twenty

years ago, hangs clothes from her heavy basket,

the basket my brother and I carried

together, each a handle, sometimes

one letting go of the basket so it banged

against the ankles of the other. . .

My mother in her back yard, stars

or the heavier bodies of fireflies

beating away dark outside her windows, her

“show” she calls it when she talks to me,

long-distance. Light

that owns a body—ash-light forms her outline,

her silhouette that paced across my last night’s dream,

the hall-lit moth that turned out

to be her, solid, lifting

the basket, sleeves in her hands, my arms, she lifts my

unbruised ankles over her elbow, she carries

me clean and dry inside our old house, our house

with its oak floor, its unbroken window onto the road away.

Lightsey Darst lives in Minneapolis, where she writes on dance, curates mnartists.org’s “What Light” poetry contest, and teaches English and humanities. In 2007 she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Publications include The Antioch Review, The Literary Review, Gulf Coast, and New Letters.

Date of Publication: 01 May 2008