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.