Tom Daley
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My Mother Speaks to Me on the Morning of Her Cremation
When you remember me,
remember my eyes when you lifted
the lid off the cardboard box
for one last look. Remember
they were open, no coins to weight them
shut, gray-blue and fixed on the ceiling,
still and inert, taking in nothing,
beautiful in their purposelessness.
In the future I will come up in glimpses,
pieces of me looking around your corners,
fond and animated—but now my eyes
are resolute and unperturbed,
beyond stasis, ready for the fire,
in that place where damage
and healing are mutually suppressed,
where ambition and frustration
have steamed away between
the tiny ridges of a sand bar
leaving a little salt, a little grit.
Half Moon Bay
Do you remember the pickup truck
with the cardboard sign
and tomato samples that silted our mouths
like the clay of a good Chianti?
Poached in the clashing heat
of packet salt and black pepper,
we skewered them
on plastic forks
and took them whole.
In the car
under the breath
of a fourth Bloody Mary
poured from your thermos
you said I was gray
as the mold that grows
on a greenhouse lime,
that I’d be fit to swallow
when I’ve skinned the shade
from my own shadow.
I forget sometimes
the exact flavor of your lip gloss,
how the fogbank that afternoon
dogged the coastal ridge,
the way you shove
a glove compartment shut.
But I remember those tomatoes—
how they plumped my throat
with their slurry and verve.
Tabor’s Farm
A man was walking in the snow
with a sheaf of dry brush
and a broken branch that he found
in the woods bordering the road.
Someone took a picture of the man—
his head turned slightly;
a silhouette with glasses
turning towards the woods.
The man was walking in the road.
The snow was newly fallen.
The man carried something dry and broken.
The light was changing.
The changing lit the man’s hand
as he held the brush
and carried the branch.
The man wore a short black coat.
His head was turned and looking
at something in the woods along the road.
The man with glasses and a black coat
walking in the light
on a road bordered by the woods.
The fallen snow covered the road.
The man held a broken branch
and a sheaf of dry brush.
Half Moon Bay” was originally published in Southern Humanities Review.
Bio
Tom Daley's poems have been published in a number of journals including Harvard Review, Rio Grande Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, 32 Poems, Del Sol Review, Diagram, Poetry Ireland Review, and Perihelion and have been anthologized in Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology. My manuscript, Shim, was a finalist in The Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award.