Keeping Time

 

Always before you had been nimble.
While 78s whirled, your pink
satin-slippered feet traced
graceful patterns round and round

in perfect time.  You held my hands
high above my head,
laughing partners.  So you taught
me how to dance, to enter
a room with grace, to please
and thank, to welcome, to pen
the proper note
                      Here, too
it all counts;  the slow I-V,
a calibrated beaker, screens monitor
what one calls your progress.  
Not all these tubes and wires together
can keep you tethered.  I feed you ice
chips like pomegranate seeds.

Mother, I promise to remember
your beauty.  I study your face,
seek your errant pulse, learn
from you one more, this last, the
necessary lesson.

 

 

Housekeeping

 

The women knew what they were doing.
Sometimes I think of them,
her friends, Rose and Grace,
efficient, bent over her bed, stripping it,
smoothing the fresh sheets, stooping
to make hospital corners tucked tight.
I must have been gone hours for all
the laundry to have been folded away. Even
then I wanted to sleep in the nest of her bed.

For a long time the house held
the smell of stale smoke like an echo
as though I wanted that too, kept close.

Mother, forgive me. I have been
making changes. Nothing is just
as you left it. Some things are past
saving, gone through slow erosion.
Still, each spring I take down the worn
curtains to wash by hand. You grew
breathless, expanding the narrow task
to teach me, hoping your keeping house
would, for another round of seasons, last.

 

--Miriam Kotzin

 

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