I

If there is a god, then the god is not speaking,
only breathing in and out
through the mouth of my mother.
Her repeated rasps
and that small tuneless humming
are all this god has left of her
with which to work,
these and the thick gravel
of her cough, the sound of a gate
being forced:
won't quite close, won't quite open.

I sit in front of what the inevitable will do
to any one of us, how it takes us away
breath by breath.
Listen,
you, God, or whatever
you call yourself now
inside her, pulling her breath in and out:
she was once my mother.

The shy nurse knocks, comes in,
"Is there anything I can get you?"
I say, "No," and she, too, shakes her head,
of course there is nothing to get you.
She closes the door behind her
as she leaves us to our work.
It is not beautiful, this dying,
but it is what this god has for a tool.
And the moon sets
on the last night
God will ever use her
to breathe

:::

Mother, I address you now as a victor
speaks to the defeated:
there is a boat hidden down in the harbor.
It has no oars, no motor,
no need of a captain.
It is time now to escape the burning city,
torched beyond recognition.
Let the tide carry you out to sea.
Don't try anything as hopeless
as being. I tell you this as the one
who has spent his life
trying to force happiness on you.
No one will come to your rescue.
Only sky and water now.
Only horizon.

:::

Outside your window, the lake and the setting moon,
trapped inside the smoke pluming up from the factory,
turning it as gray as your own sinking face,
this day that will take you with it
as it leaves.

2

Afterwards,
they covered with a simple sheet
the face that had once been
yours and now seemed empty
of the god no longer inside it,
no one ordering you
to continue the cruel, miraculous work
of being.

Almost immediately we left that place
where for two years you had been turned,
one side to the other each day
like an animal roasting, slowly being prepared.

Meanwhile, your grimace still in place,
you lay alone under fluorescent lights
in a room no one ever visits alive
unless they are paid to do so.
Sometime during that long night,
maybe while we ate, maybe later,
while we were washing dishes,
a stranger took away your sheet
to be washed, ironed, and folded.
Then quickly, without ceremony,
you were given to the flames.

3

There is no turning back,
no way to flee to another country.
Gray is the new National Anthem:
what matters now is not what you say,
but to whom you pledge your allegiance.
What matters is: do you see her sycamore?
Her cardinals? The moon she swore surprised her
each time?

4

At twelve, I decided I should become a saint.
And now, surely the time has come
to put on brown robes, the rough sandals
only those holier than us
strap to their feet.
Time to look out from the sad, crazed eyes
of grief's holy confusion
ontot the cut glass of February sunlight.
And time at long last for the unfamiliar, intriguing scent of self-forgetfulness,
the scent of the earth as it is.

Time to pray to the world as a saint might pray:
once you were my mother, once I was yours.

:::

The world is beautiful, yet fails its beauty.
What choice, but to love the failings themselves
as she loved the clouds out her hospital window,
mistaking them for birds,
never quite able to remember
their names.
I could hear her tuneless humming
as if, blood harmony, it were also being hummed
inside me, and I saw what my mother saw,
those rain-filled shapes she mistook
for robins, seagulls, sparrows.
Not a god myself,
still I see how it works in heaven:
Birds, she said.