A grimace pulled my mother’s face into concentric rings,
Like wavelets dancing around a tuning fork in water,
Then her spirit departed,
And as it rolled across her countenance
It smoothed away her agony,
Rolled upward, and at the same time
The old woman across the hall died,
Their spirits twirling about each other like binary stars —
The two old ladies leaving behind husks
That bear the imprint of their lives.
They are neutrinos now,
At the speed of light time has stopped
And the scale that can weigh them does not exist.
They start off on their impervious circuit,
Following the curve of the universe,
And many billions of years in the future
They reach their starting point.
Our sun has long ago flared out
And earth has turned to dust.
The two old ladies fly through the memories of our world,
They read the fates of their sons and daughters,
Of their grandsons and granddaughters,
They sigh and smile,
They listen to conversations in the atmosphere spreading into space,
They watch life evolve in the seas that boiled away.
They have no heart for another round
And slow, back into the flow of time,
Gain mass and find each a golden moment.
The old lady across the hall is at dinner late at night,
The heat of the day finally drifting off
To warm the outer planets.
The Chianti has the beauty of pottery shaped and painted by peasants.
Under the table her lover’s toes move slowly down her calf,
And the force that pushes shoots through the soil
And impels swans toward Africa
Fills her body and she is a lioness
Feeling her mate’s teeth prickling her nape,
And this is the moment she chooses to fly through, for eternity.
My mother slowed and searched many moments,
Long she searched her miseries,
But at last she was young and tall,
Slipping out the courtyard,
Away from her many-eyed sleeping sons,
On long strides on her long strong legs.
Someone had poured molten silver in the public trough.
The scents of vetch and edelweiss were colored streams
Floating just above the grass.
She followed the blues and reds and yellows,
Like a wolf in the forest.
A soft whistle drew her to a grove,
And an arm circled her waist,
Pulled her to a broad chest.
She smelled the tangy smell of pine resin and sawn planks,
Her fingertips followed the curve of his curls,
Followed the convolutions of his ear,
Like a seashell, like the curve of space-time,
Felt the tingle of his unshaven cheek…

I cannot see my mother,
For she is impossibly far in the future,
Racing inside a memory,
Dwelling forever in a single moment.

December 2nd, 2006