Your mother is standing on the
edge
Where clouds lick the cliff’s
face.
You hear her scream torn from the
roots,
Where blackberry lips hide their
thorns.
They prick the memory of her kiss.
Your mother looks down on your
world
Before she sways and rushes to
enter it.
She loses her grip, light as a
tendril falling.
Listen to her voice rise above the
whir of wings.
Now see the birds tumbling with
her like confetti.
You are her photographer and made
in her image.
Beneath her shadow you meter and
expose the flight,
Gathering the arc of her life in a
solitary flash.
You tell yourself what this all
comes down to:
That tennis is the only game where
love means zero,
That you won’t be buried by this
parting shot,
That you will remake her gray life
into quicksilver memory
And fit that lie within your
comfortable frame.
Don
Kunz is Emeritus Professor of English from the
University of Rhode Island, now retired to Bend, Oregon. His poems have been published
in Arizona Literary Review, The Asheville
Poetry Review, Borderlands, Bryant Literary Review, The Cape Rock,
Confrontation Magazine, English Journal, The Iconoclast, Midwest Poetry Review,
The Newport Review, Philomel, Prairie Winds, The Sierra Nevada College Review,
Soundings East, South Dakota Review, Trestle Creek Review, Verve, Vietnam Generation,
and Whole Notes. They have won
awards from the Arizona Authors' Association, Midwest Poetry Review, Oregon
State Poets Association, Philomel, and Sparrowgrass Poetry Forum.