Hair Receiver

I hear the creak of my mother’s

dresser drawers withdrawing.

Our house’s center of gravity rests

where she gets dressed,

her bureau, a scalloped-mahogany bit

of wedding-cake-shaped furniture.

The Farm Bureau is just down the road. Hay

is weighed there. Great, slow tractors

arrive like returning dinosaurs. Bureau:

A location of gathering,

of great decision-making. Atop her bureau,

a radio-alarm clock gives us the time and the news.

Before me, the family hairbrush.

A tightly gathered carpet of browns

(aside from my sister’s hair, the color of marigolds)

has grown in it for long enough

to escape the family’s notice.

Shed hair can be offered as nesting material to birds.

We children share a chest-of-drawers;

I stand before it naked, deciding, my white chest

pale and smooth, long before

the mourning doves’ oval call

circles the house.

Atop her bureau, my mother keeps

her own hairbrush to herself.

She pulls her shed hair from the brush,

placing it in a hair-receiver,

a family heirloom, a porcelain dome

the size of a teacup, upside-down, with a gold-

rimmed hole at the top, neat as a volcano.

I collect the uncalculated excess of hair.

The family brush is a small, stripped tree in my hand.

The insides of the hair receiver are swirled up like a still tornado.

I carry the lot of it outside,

let it go to the wind,

the telephone wires, treetops,

distant roofs