For Pat Stone*

            I remember you from a time once before dinosaurs roamed
the city streets, reeking of peach scented candles and boxed wine,
yearning for some sort of darkness.
            Reading from the novels of Stephen King as if they
were revisions of the bible.
            Who found darkness in a mammogram and shoved it into
her pocket along with the rusty brooches and earrings.
            Who lost love with an aneurysm.
            Who lost love with withering age.
            Who lost love with pneumonia.
            Where the remainder of her loved only existed in her short,
black hair growing from the roots of the past.
            Where her eyes look back onto the golden infinity known as
the old cornfield next to the big red barn of Mid-Western-Minnesotan  
conformity.
            Of the calls made to mother regarding how she'll die each time 
she notices something new.
            Who cried with me when mother had left me for sailing the sky.

            Oh, she was the mother.
            The mother of a generation much like mine.
            The mother who was the domestic wife in her natural habitat of
pots, pans and aprons.  
            The mother who was softer than the belt.
            The mother who kept family gatherings illuminated with award
winning short stories of brother, brother or sister.
            The mother who dealt with apocalypse that was Karen Grenier
as a child.
            The mother who did it.
            The mother who created lives and the mother who took death
as one of her daily pills.

            Brother, brother and sister now out the door, gone to make
their marks.
            The mother who was left only to mother the darkness in tastes of
boxed wine and Stephen King.