1
My face in the puddle on the street,
laying cast away
and gurgling with its last bursts of life
reminds me that nothing lives forever.

I am not that face,
dying in the puddle
inside it, I am something entirely different.

It’s somebody’s mother.
It can’t be me.
Her face droops to the ground in a perpetual frown.
I don’t like it.
I don’t want it.
It can’t be me.
2
My memory fails me and…..
I forget.
What is
that word?  
3
How do you get from there to here—
crying in a delivery room
to crying in the nursing home
because your family left you and you are all
alone.
Faster than you’d ever imagined.

Like my father said at Nana’s funeral,
the casket falling through the ground,
“Too soon”
4
Life
a fly against the window,
then
a fly twitching on the floor.

A tightly grasping hand,
Then,
The  abrupt
Loosening of the grip.