As She Lay Dying (Memento Mori)

I crawled into my mother’s bed as she lay dying and slipped my arms around her tender body wasted and waiting it was like holding a child she was clean and powdered sleeping quietly except for the soft rattle in her throat and the tiny wheeze in sync with the rise and fall of her narrow chest a cage of bone and breath and laboring heart the places where the comb had raked through her shampooed hair were like rows in the garden ready for planting her gown had slipped up past her knees her thighs were a new shape made of marble or oak already a monument to longevity I had said goodbye so many times I thought I had used up the possibilities but this was proving untrue Yom Kippur, 2015 Santa Rosa, CA; Union City, NJ