Memories on Your Birthday

  Artefacts of your life: Duke, Moscow, the A. T,

  the Naval Academy, what came before Rick,

  Russian, Arabic; the longing for what you spoke,

  saw, and never shared. The short-fibered feeling

  of your prayer rug under my quietly questing fingers,

  sliding, pausing, stopping, looking up, moon-faced, at

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  you. How religion and the sanctity of a soul are traded

  for a moment’s relief; how turkey bacon can make a family

  weep, smoke wandering up to touch too-high ceilings; how

  twenty-seven and thirty-two are numbers confused & discarded

  in the miasma of my memory—of him—of you. Motherhood

  is lost on me the same way half-learned prayers in languages

  foreign slip the mind like fingers of water on waxed windows,

  the same way I conflate the images of three houses and thirteen years,

  no different from the conflicting stories your daughters and I tell—

  It’s the same feeling as when you left for Cairo like a sparrow in the night

  and returned with a ring on your finger and the devil in your suitcase.