TO MY MOTHER

 

Had you survived that August afternoon

of Bright’s Disease, you would be sixty-three,

and I would not be rummaging for words

to plot or rhyme what I would speak to you.

Tonight I found a diary you kept

in nineteen twenty-eight, and while I read

your script in English, Arabic, and Greek,

I grudged those perished years and nearly wept

and cursed whatever god I often curse

because I scarcely knew one day with you

or heard you sing or call me by my name.

I know you were a teacher and a nurse

and sang at all the summer festivals.

You made one scratched recording of a song

I often play when no one else is home,

but that is all I have to keep you real.

The rest exists in fragile photographs,

a sudden memoir in my father’s eyes

and all the anecdotes of thirty years

remembered like a portrait torn in half

and torn in half again until a word

deciphered in a diary rejoins

these tatters in my mind to form your face

as magically as music overheard

can summon and assemble everything

about a day we thought forever past.

For one recovered second you are near.

I almost hear you call me and sing

before the world recoils and returns…

I have no monument, my beautiful,

to offer you except these patterned lines.

They cannot sound the silences that burn

and burn, although I try to say at last

there lives beyond this treachery of words

your life in me anew and in that peace

where nothing is to come and nothing past.

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