For Natividad
My mother keeps telling me
to search for things with eyes open.
Not with mouth or anger.
But when I asked her once more
where she kept the chipped green
Tupperware with the lid lost
to our many cousins, she turned
to me with a pout, lips rounded
like a sweet little donut on her face
lovingly aged. I smiled as a slight
upward tilt with her head completed
this brief pantomime.
“There,” she said with neither detail
nor finger that points to a discovery
(the point of all that is human?).
Just this kind of kiss meant to reveal
things that needed finding, like some
actual kisses do. I think we search
with all parts and organs,
just as a mountain seeks
for trees and rivers and animals
with ledges and folds and caves to be
a proper mountain: lungs to construe
crispness of morning air,
or toes to fathom foot of water,
tender nibble of sand. “Here,”
my mother finally said,
and I got more than I asked for.
In this she proved herself wrong,
this she found not with her eyes.
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