Mothers Can’t Live in Your Future

I treat the future as past,
a bright yellow house I inhabited,
filled with broken furniture
needing repair, replacement, to be
quickly put to the match or just all thrown out.
There is a kitchen with pots and pans
everywhere and much flour dusting everything— 
and bread, bread, bread, so so so much bread.  
Maybe I will keep that aqua sofa with 
the broken frame and pop-out spring
or that oil portrait of my dead father
with the eye gouge that makes it look that his 
ghost is still watching over me.
My mother (God rest her soul) was 
my door and she took the door with her.

I wish I could claw out 
a space for her in the 
partial darkness beyond
but she  refuses 
to move from her space in my
soul’s basement in a way I 
can not hammer through at all. 
Only the heartbeat and 
breath we clearly share moves forward. 
She was a great dancer
but I could never learn the right steps.
Oh mother, mother dance for me again,
in the distant, distant horizon. 

.