Sirloin my mother cooked hastily for me

as I was packing up my things once again.

It dripped red as she pressed it to my lips

when I leaned down to kiss her goodbye.

 

I never knew watching someone eat

could be a kind of prayer, but she was praying

as I chewed whatever meat she gave me;

meat cooked while leaning on crutches,

 

still too much weight on her busted foot.

Kissing me goodbye she tried to stand

but wavered like a house being punished by wind,

a house stripped of shingles.

 

And my father pulls off into the gas station

to fill his empty tank. The flow of gas sounds

like the flow of blood. The same pressure.

The same insistence. The same rush and fill.

 

 

When I first try to call her the phone rings and rings

and the recorded voice that only resembles my mother

tells me she is unavailable. I know she is home

without power, unable to search the internet

for a job. Her sadness is a weight heavy as a car

and I lift using all my imagination. I say to her:

imagine your path in front of you lit with white light.

I say: picture yourself filing the bars of your prison-cell,

the filings covering your sweaty hands making them silver,

your arms silver, your face. She tells me a woman saw her crying

at the bus stop the other day, gave her a prayer in Spanish.

She tells me her friend the inn-keeper has a spare room

and could use some help in the garden. I say: picture your hands

in raw soil, the moist black kind with the white pellets.

Picture your hands planting flowers, red ones

and purple ones, blue ones and yellow ones.

 

 

 

The girl downstairs is crying and no

this is not about my mother, not at all,

as the sobs rise through the floor like

nothing else. The girl downstairs is crying

and I hear the echo of my mother's small room

miles away in New York, remember

how I heard her through my thickest sheets,

through the the fingers blocking my ears,

heard her rise, the tender nob of her body

turning and turning without opening any doors

to any place. Tonight I listen from my bed,

as if the girl's cries are a radio show in a language

I understand but cannot speak.

I fall asleep to the sound of a stranger's sobbing.

I'm home.