I watch my mother sleep
swathed in white
the color of apple blossoms in spring
while she is all
bruised arms, thin-skinned,
the ripened fruit
ready to fall from the tree of our life,
from a branch of living splendor,
falling from a great tree
where she will be picked up
by some hand
and carried away.
Yesterday was a day without words,
just her blue eyes looking into my dark ones
and in this gaze we found a way
across the latitudes of our separate lives
that began with the miraculous catastrophe of my birth
to the longitudes of our worlds
that have never been mapped
and will now never be named.
Yet at the end,
even with the struggling breath,
we had such grace
and I thought how little we know
of the house built of that splendid tree,
not even how to reach it,
not a road on any map,
not the true depths of another life,
just doors and windows,
never what’s inside,
and they close tighter now.
How we all forget that first breath
but remember, each of us,
the last of those we love
then she went to breathe
with a great and constant
something larger.