How many risings can a poem tolerate? Help me. . . however you can. You see what I cannot. Thanks.
In the Nursing Home
May, late afternoon. She’s lucid.
I memorize every sweet word.
She notices a fly—zooming, rising.
In this extreme state of clarity,
I don’t want to leave.
She calls my name more than once.
It’s like a light clicked on.
Nothing amiss:
she asks me to water the philodendron,
recalls a friend joking at the dining table.
Everything, just right as it is.
But then,
hours after I left the nursing home,
without consulting me, she left this world.
Her room looks the same
as I gaze around—newspapers
and circle-the-word books piled high,
clock and radio in place.
The plant, rising.
A housekeeper peeks in.
She hopes to sweep and mop soon.
I understand but will not be hurried.
I am grounded in a boundless deep
as I finger, fold, pack
my mother’s things.
When carrying the last box outside,
I note the flutter of a butterfly,
then the flag, rising in the wind.
In the Nursing Home
May, late afternoon. She’s lucid.
I memorize every sweet word.
She notices a fly—zooming, rising.
In this extreme state of clarity,
I don’t want to leave.
She calls my name more than once.
It’s like a light clicked on.
Nothing amiss:
she asks me to water the philodendron,
recalls a friend joking at the dining table.
Everything, just right as it is.
But then,
hours after I left the nursing home,
without consulting me, she left this world.
Her room looks the same
as I gaze around—newspapers
and circle-the-word books piled high,
clock and radio in place.
The plant, rising.
A housekeeper peeks in.
She hopes to sweep and mop soon.
I understand but will not be hurried.
I am grounded in a boundless deep
as I finger, fold, pack
my mother’s things.
When carrying the last box outside,
I note the flutter of a butterfly,
then the flag, rising in the wind.