Rally
A third day of wet gray skies, a stalled chill pressing on me like a hand
three years after my mother's deathduring a blizzard that shut down
my town two hundred miles north, gray skies unloading
until the airports closed, the roads, until she ran out of breath
the same day she'd called to tell me she was all right, wait out the storm,
her voice strong with what doctors called her rally to say good-bye,
common, they see it all the time, her voice so clear in my head today
I want to answer it, so I do, with a few words to the empty house
and with her hard life burning in my stomach when I imagine her
looking out past her walker to the gray sky outside,
and beyond that to my father, her parents, the God she'd prayed to
all her life, especially at the end, those rosary beads still wrapped
around her fingers when I got there an hour too late.
A third day of wet gray skies, a stalled chill pressing on me like a hand
three years after my mother's deathduring a blizzard that shut down
my town two hundred miles north, gray skies unloading
until the airports closed, the roads, until she ran out of breath
the same day she'd called to tell me she was all right, wait out the storm,
her voice strong with what doctors called her rally to say good-bye,
common, they see it all the time, her voice so clear in my head today
I want to answer it, so I do, with a few words to the empty house
and with her hard life burning in my stomach when I imagine her
looking out past her walker to the gray sky outside,
and beyond that to my father, her parents, the God she'd prayed to
all her life, especially at the end, those rosary beads still wrapped
around her fingers when I got there an hour too late.
Fall 2007
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