Outside it was light-filled as only
a warm western morning can be, sky
arching wide for all the birds
to fly without touching wings. So many
times had I seen patients on days such
as these and wished I could dispel their
air of unease, help them stretch their arms
and not finger illness and death.
Inside her own house for the last time,
the back of her rocking chair shaping
her spine, her talk an excuse to linger
a while, Mama says she cannot bear
to leave behind, throw, tear, yellowed slips
of paper, leases and bills from faded years,
smudged letters refolded, fragile with creases;
they fall to pieces when I bring them to her.
How can I begrudge her
this moment, one I've been unable to stay?
So I haul scrapbooks crammed open, a blue
stole with jagged moth-holes, a scraped
antique ring, with jade stone missing,
like the pendant she wore at my birth - its
silver chain the sole remnant of that joy-ragged
hour - all jammed into drawers, like those
of countless others, like those
of all mothers grown old with pain.
Cardboard boxes askew, some empty,
most full, lie on the bare floor of the home
where she nested so long. Mama, it's late,
we can't take it all. I hate saying the words. She
nods yes at last, clutches a fallen tile
from the kitchen wall, fast to her chest.
Shadows lengthen inside, hoverings from the past.
I don't have the spark to protest.
I knew then as I know it still; she felt the cold
in her bones - but no more than I did. On that
lambent day with its honed ray of chill, I grew old
as well, when Mama stopped rocking, still
as a fallen bird with a broken wing. Her
fluttering sigh is trapped in my mind, spilling
out of my hoard of sleepless nights. I see her
wave with one hand, then my sight is sapped,
my eyes bored by the hot, taunting sun.
Some other doctor soon will see
Mama in her nursing home; and I -
I will dream of grown birds unable to fly.