Brushes With The Dark Law

 Published in The Angel Rust magazine, issue VII, January, 2022

Are the Rockies that Far Away?

When the call came to tell me mom died
my hand put the phone down and reached for the glass pipe.
I wanted the familiar fog that failed to numb,
but did hide the world.
 
I had seen her the night before, and carefully cleaned
the putrescence draining from her bedsores. I’d looked down to see her face
smashed into the chrome guardrails; she’d made no sound.
 
I rolled her on her burning back, sought her eyes,
“do you know your whole family loves you?”
She stared back from some mysterious space,
eyes once brown and powerful dried with gray pain now,
baffled that I’d said anything denying the mystery she saw.
Did I expect an answer?
 
Months before tumors the size of grapefruits
had cleaved her brain away and left her sputtering.
Then I, having read of the mindful role of loved ones
meeting at the edge, asked, so to give her permission to go,
“mom, do you want to die?”
She turned those knowing eyes to focus
on her youngest son,
“are you crazy?”, she asked.
She didn’t expect an answer.
 
A week later, a bright blue winter day,
I found her in her room slumped in a wheelchair,
the sun, through Venetian blinds, throwing horizontal bands
on her hands, pricked and swollen.
I rolled her out to the tarmac and the air outside where
the rocky San Gabriels were white with rare snow.
She looked up to those mountains and she, haphazardly
capable of any word at all with less than
half her brain left in her skull, sang out loud and strong
“When it’s Springtime in the Rockies…” 
We stopped rolling, I stopped pushing her, to focus
on this artifact of who she was. Or even more, a clue,
emerging now at the end, of someone she was
I didn’t know.  She looked back at me from the mountains, blasé
almost surprised herself at these parts of her still left,
and she sang a robust second verse
 
And though I long to be back in the Rockies
I'll wait until the springtime comes…
 
The Trickster, though terminal, still had a pretty voice.
 
Another day at the City of Hope,
before she came home to live with dad and die,
(she’d been housed in a bungalow
like a vintage SoCal hot springs spa -
starched white sheets, TB recovery, and healing mineral water - 
or a Raymond Chandler mystery’s illicit autocourt,
or the old rehab cottage at Los Robles hospital
where W.C. Fields died and where I’d spent time too)
I walked in and she was on her back, looking up at the ceiling,
 
her hands lightly poised in the air above her chest,
fingertips touching, left and right hands
lightly bouncing against each other,
the scholar’s gesture.
She was ruminating, considering,
pondering, not unpleasantly, some deeper meaning
only she knew.
She turned her head when she heard me.
She smiled softly, politely greeting a familiar face,
“here’s my little girl-boy,
I wish I knew your story.”
 
Then the shadow passed over her face,
with half a brain left, she still traced
a certain line that perhaps she’d crossed.
Although, too, maybe just a reflection from my unset face.
We both pulled back. Again. She, back in the body ending life.
Me, hiding from too much light.
 
“Mildred, I wish you knew my story.”
 
Are the mountains far away?
I don’t expect an answer right now.
Not yet.