As You Were

February is quick and cold

And smells

of wood smoke

and hospice.

The promise of springtime

is out there somewhere.

It is buried in the

dirty snow.

His bedside purrs

With the sound of machinery

On walls hang lifetimes

He no longer knows.

Mostly I am a friendly stranger.

Willful and wild,

I was a difficult child

to raise.

Kitchen table talk when we did

And round and round it

we ran.

“You can still,” he would say,

“Pull it from the fire.”

But the fire was in me,

The fire

was me.

At fifteen, I fought with him.

At fifty, for him.

April is fresh and wet

and sounds of birdsong

and tiny rain.

He will be gone

by summer.

Flowers surround,

and sweetness lingers.

The air warm and lush,

And soft

as a heart sigh.

He will be whole again

Yet I will be here,

Orphaned and broken,

Hollow

as a husk.

The things he was right about,

The ways I was wrong.

If only I had said them

Before memory took flight.

But the mind is a liar,

The soul,

a soft speaker,

And the heart

is too weary

to interrupt.