Ragged Point Inn

Day flowing like oil down a glass straw,

light trickling up my chin as the sun lowers.

Irigaray, dress shoes, camel blue after

camel blue after something that splits

enough to raw or raws enough to split.

David Lloyd says metaphor operates as a function

of hierarchy and assimilation. I don’t know.

I ask my mother, whom psychoanalysis

is always trying to turn into a metaphor.

Youtube bedtime: a pretty woman debrides

my mind of tiny plastic doll furniture.

Alone in the woods, I had bent to look at some toads

but they were poults and the mother-turkey launched

up through the underbrush with a wail of despair.

Nobody’s the vehicle, we’re both the tenor.

My mother knows nothing

more than I do but she carries it better.

If she were a metaphor I could turn into her.