We are sitting by my dying mother’s bed. My father
is reading aloud from National Geographic,
“The Sex Life of Anacondas.” He describes the males
wadded around one female into a breeding ball
that can last four weeks. Who knows how
she lives with it? Happily, she is much larger
than the males. They know by her heft which one
she is. My mother is in a coma and likely
cannot hear about the anacondas, although hearing
is the last to go. She has had all of that she can stand,
already. The one lamp is just enough for the magazine.
I get up and lean over her twilit bed. I smooth
her hair, which has almost no gray. I think how
gray is an absence, whereas brown is still fair game.
I lean into her face and shout, “I love you,”
the way the nurses said to do. They say
to her, “I’m going to aspirate your throat now,
Mrs. Brown, so you can breathe better,” even though
she keeps on with her soft gasping. Our minds
keep piling on the same old facts, same
old guesswork. Sometimes a spark of recognition
can come at the end. I would like that: some
gathering up of loose threads, some compensation.
In the funeral car,
my father describes how a rotary brake works,
using his middle finger to point as he has for years
since his forefinger tendon was severed by a broken dish—
the gesture with its tinge of sexuality, its up-yours,
that he at other times slyly acknowledges. Our driver
looks straight ahead. To speak of love is hard
here, the way it’s hidden in the mechanism
as if one word’s as good as the other.