My mother,
small thick and
sixty-two this year.

I know her advice on daily measures
resonates much deeper than I admit;
always seeming to pry at that
lone heart-string.

Sometimes, when I am home alone,
I go through her things;
her old photographs,
her high school yearbooks,
her letters;

and I read them.

I imagine her this way:
young, like me,
and in love,
married,
driving a babyblue
Volkswagen Beetle,

telling of how it was the
best car
she ever drove;
the American Dream.

I like to think
my mother
was a pin-up girl instead;
her peroxide hair
glowing in the sun;
the summer of 1971.