Explaining God the Mother to My Father

they went to Mount Charleston for the sagebrush the pines
            the all-women
prayer circles to hear their own leavened voices
            in the name of the Father they howled—

sisters, herbalists, flight attendants, lawyers, piano teachers,
            mothers with good intentions
just like me they went to the mountains to stand closer to God
            the Mother

can’t you see they didn’t go to thumb their noses at God
            they ascended the mountain
to refuge to find her to call her the color of sky to whinny
            and shimmer before

her fluttering robes of clouds dappled by her ferocious love
            her unmuzzled loneliness
her voice obbligato—

men’s distortions dimming with the receding city lights
            they eschewed
the vespiary of patriarchy thrust upon them by generations of pioneer
            ancestors

my mother never attended you never let her I wish
            she would have stood up to you just once
I wish she would have stood up and taken me with her