My Mother Who Can’t
see my face clear enough to know me in Macy’s until she hears my voice wants to go out in the trees look for the comet. She sighs how she used to be able to jump up from a yoga position now has to catch her breath. She wants to learn to disco says how when she wanted to dance they wouldn’t let her still she danced on bare toes as if her feet were in pointe shoes. The comet she says like a child dreaming of marzipan we could go out in the trees look up for that brightness lashing us with light that won’t be here again for 200 years as she moves by touching the scarred red wood slowly up stairs she used to take three at a time
In My Mother’s Last Hours
Murray, she calls out to a man she hasn’t talked to in half a year, I have to go to the bathroom. Just sitting near the bed I think how yesterday she wanted to help me cut up zucchini. She seems to look past what she sees, shakes her head when I say I love her. I don’t, she says, want to spend another winter in Stowe, she says to shadow, to nothing. I don’t believe this is happening, I jot on a page in a spiral notebook as if to keep what I can’t.
