Not Yet Turning The Page

Blue day, and I don't mean the sky. Two hours of dental surgery, eleven hundred dollars lighter in the pocket (no dental plan since I'm self-employed) and thoughts of my mother throughout. She would have been eighty-nine today. I wrote this last year:




MAMIE PALMU 1919-2006


You're already air.

Skin and bone housing
Flicking gusts of sound.

"I love you.
You'll always be helped."

Outside the dirty pane
A robust crow alights
On the denuded elm's
Smoky stump, and picks
Its breast clean of snow
Falling in fat flakes
Amongst the winged folds
As if agitating flow
(O cruel illusion)
Through your black and purple feet.

And when I look back,
Sudden as a dreamstop,
Your breath faint as smoke,
The crow is gone,
But in my mind
A hawk devours
A butcherbird
And lifts its song through
Gravitational flakes
In devolving circles
Till, a black dot,
It disappears.