Tug Dumbly - Arvening

A boy enters quiet and there’s the tiny shock

to catch a dropped face, his mother unawares,

faintly sainted and suffused in suffering

she stands at the suffering sink

softly sunk in unmoored light, a peaceful

beast in pastured night, asleep to an elsewhere

tethered life, a fish sweetly swept

in tropical light, tear’s trek dried through

floured cheek, onion hands to apron thighs,

lost and profound in the arvening glow of

orange-pink haloing the yard and

spilling the lip of the kitchen window

to bath this sweetly sagged face, dropped to its

natural resting place, that unmade face

we most meet in long ago, windfallen to its

natural sweetness and goodness, a patient mango.