In Praise of Agnès Varda

Not some burly smith
but sea swimmer
lover of elms
essayist, editor,
cat lover, intuiter,
bowl-cutted mother of cinema.

Mother of Cléo
knowing in your own first bloom
how death would stalk all beauty
and how triumph contained despair.

Mother of a motherless vagabond
whose [I]pietà[/I] is piss-stained,
rigored in the frozen earth
of a turned potato field.

Mother of Jacquot de Nantes
your own dying husband
giving him a second beautiful childhood
even as his cancer ate him whole.

Mother of scavengers,
street-lost hustlers, mother of
community philosophers
tarot-turners
of the homeless lost
and the never found.

Mother of a howling man
chasing an apple
into a storm drain.

I think of you often
how you would make us all look
through the hoop of your forefinger
and thumb
and laugh a tinkling grandmother’s laugh
your nose glistening
like a drunkard’s thumb.

I think of the
Algerian labourers
prostitutes
jazzmen
tree surgeons
the black panthers
the movie stars
and the gleaners
how they all lived
and shall thrive now forever
in your windows and your mirrors
between your finger and your thumb
beneath the dreaming skirts
of a watchful mother’s eye.