For
mom
Monday
Morning
As I wash the tumblers and a stray coffee mug
I rush through impatiently, not seeing
Hardly believing that as a child
I begged for this chore.
I’d splash in the dish water
While you played your "housecleaning music."
I remember the records spinning on the turntable;
Hearing Carly Simon singing
About clouds in her coffee
Makes me wonder what you saw
In your morning cup and why
I never thought to look; never tried to see.
Tuesday
Afternoon
Folding laundry, I remember
You made this rust and brown and cream afghan,
And one day you had to unravel
Several too-short rows
Because you lost track of the end.
I think of how we lose track of
Things we wished we’d paid attention to,
And find faults we don’t want to see.
I’m beginning to find patterns;
Mistakes I never noticed before
Repeated in folds of afghans,
Knitted in lines of poetry.
Saturday
Night
Looking at the sky I see the moon and remember
Whenever us kids rode in the car at night
We’d see the moon and exclaim how it chased us.
But when you were chasing us around,
Did you ever look up and wonder if there was more
Than this written in the stars for you?
Seeing the sky tonight I realize
We have both chased and have been followed by
The same moon phases; the same seasons of stars.
In the dot-to-dot constellations I find
The shapes of the stories we share, the ways we are
connected.
Even when things seem so dark I cannot see beyond
myself,
I try to remember there is still light to be found,
A guiding star, mom, a beacon
Despite the distance.
