When D. said he’d had the impulse, thought it
kindness to cover her face
in the goose down pillow, D. in all his clinical remove,
wanting to stop her suffering,
and she, no longer able to swallow,
her mouth stuck open,
a gurgling in the back of her throat, her voice
taken and replaced
by a deep feathered silence, I felt
the jump of pulse
in her neck, the kick as it thumped
her hardening arteries,
the burst vessel bluing her temple,
and knew now—after knowing all
these months she was dying— I wasn’t ready,
though I’d thought I was
rational as D. knowing the inevitable
which crests over all of us, was
cresting now over her, not ready and panicked
in the undertow, a desperate need
to fight the great muscled ocean, my brother raising
the pillow, the curls along his thick arms
graying, the great roiled undertow
which pins us and blindly takes
all our unfathomable loves, our tender
unmet needs and suffers them
to an abiding silence, my mother, her hands
gripping the sheets where they’d
been folded, a grip so muted now, her whole
bodily attention focused on continuance,
on beat and breathe, though I held her
and cried, as they told me to,
and said, “You can go. It’s okay, you can go.”
