On my mother’s
birthday, rain
as pale as her antique
hide
sketches columns in
the air:
Doric columns, plain
fluting
without elaborate
capitals.
Driving south to visit
her
in the nursing home I
sever
half a dozen towns by
rutting
the wet highway:
Winchendon,
Petersham, Ware,
Palmer, Monson,
and Hamden. None of
these places
know or love me, hills
cowering
under a thick patina
of gloom.
My mother’s
ninety-fifth birthday
hardly scars the
calendar, her face
clenched as she
watches a TV
she can barely see.
Greeting me
with her ordinary
indifference
she looks stolid as
the façade
of the family home I
had to sell
to underwrite her
terrible age.
The ashen rain looks
in on us
through slatted
blinds. The lawn
is green enough to
criticize
the room my mother
occupies
with two other women
as old
as her. Driving home
as the distance
prolongs its agony, I
feel
the clearing sky pass
through me
like an X-ray,
dividing me
from my mother as it
births me
out of my favorite
complacencies
again, again, all over
again.
William Doreski’s work has appeared in various
online and print journals, and in several collections, most recently Waiting for the Angel (2009).