Where you sat to wait out the seasons
In your maple chair, tucked in the corner
Born from smoke and dried lavender,
Old photographs and dusty necklaces
Stained the tablecloth with your empty smiles
Puffed out smoke, eyes wide out the window
Half asleep at the table in your blue bathrobe
Buried in notebooks of days past,
In a silence of summer mornings
And hazy afternoons in bed.
And that your breath was like acid,
It still stains me today and
Your words were as sweet-
When you emptied those bottles.
Still, you loved like no other
Could
Devise.
Summer nights, beer, angry phone calls-
Where I slept and knew not
What is was you did, or why it was wrong
But when the police came,
I still hid under the coffee table.
A young child's world tossing and turning
Constant, like seas that grow with rain.
Your warm presence,
Easing eyes, thick hair, soft words
The all encompassing memory that sings "Mother"
In a delicate drawl like lace on the backs of brides.
Where I sat and we laughed over daily things
And you'd tell me about your new friend
The bird that you saw, what you'd drawn
Each day you reminded me of your dreams for us,
We'd rise out of this hole
"Twelve days", you'd said in dark
You would heal,
no more medicines or therapies,
and you might have been on your way there.
Where your body draped over the toilet
Fourty-five coursing through your veins
Lungs struggling to grasp air,
Arms went limp and neck grew cold
Did you regret the decision you had made?
Darling mother.
Where I stood in the door frame
And gazed over your lifeless body,
Paralyzed in fear
Stumbled to the trees to hear my mind's calm
To escape the screaming of
Too young
Too old, at one tragic time
Quivering to check your wrists for some jumping pulse
But only a deep stillness sat over you,
Froze you in time.
And still frozen in my memory you sit,
Somewhere between where moments turn to memory
And where lifetimes turn to fiction.
Do not worry, mother.
When you left, you did not leave ashes
But a gaping pit that requires the strength of an army to fill
And the courage of a millennium to even admit it's there.
For everything you lacked, it was a gift.
To that same seven year old that hid
In a midnight hallway across a despairing wreck of a mother
And taught her to hold on.