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melodious,
    looking nowhere near me, she was
    made of some other material,
    wax or ivory or marble, she looked like
    Homer ready to be led around the known globe.
2. The Music
    On the phone my mother says she has been sorting
    her late darling’s clothes—
and it BREAKS
    my HEART
, and then there are soft sounds,
    as if she’s been lowered down, into
    a river of music.
I’m not unhappy
,
    she says,
this is better for me than church
,
    her voice through tears like the low singing
    of a watered plant long not watered,
    she lets me hear what she feels. I could be in a
    cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could
    be a young or an ancient mother.
    Now I hear the melody
    of the one bound to the mast. It had little
    to do with me, her life, which lay
    on my life, it was not really human life
    but chemical, it was approximate landscape,
    trenches and reaches, maybe it
    was ordinary human life.
    Now my mother sounds like me,
    the way I sound to myself—one
    who doesn’t know, who fails and hopes.
    And I feel, now, that I had wanted never to stop blaming her,
    like eating hard-shelled animals
    at mid-molt. But now my mother
    is like a tiny, shucked crier
    in a tide pool beside my hand. I think
    I had thought I would falter if I forgave my mother,
    as if, then, I would lose her—and I do
    feel lonely, now, to sense her beside me,
    as if she is only a sister. And yet,
    though I hear her sighs close by my ear,
    my mother is in front of me somewhere, at a distance,
    moving slowly toward the end of her life,
    the shore of the eternal—she is solitary,
    a woman alone, out ahead
    of everyone I know, scout of the mortal, heart
    breaking into solo.
3. The Ecstatic
    On her first antidepressant, my mother
    is adorable. Like many of us, she’s not
    interested in much except herself, but these
    days she’s more happily interested
    in herself. Now I think of those years with her
    as the Middle Ages, before morphine.
    We could have just put something in her food!
    like a
Rose Fairy Book
potion. Yes, I
    wanted her to put me first, I wanted
    to draw out
    Leviathan
    with an hook. But I sensed the one under
    the one under the spell—
this
one,
    the child who was in there to be tinkered down to.
    She’s had her fitting for the MedicAlert,
    “I’ve got it on, I’m all dingus’d up,
    I knew you would want to know that I’m all
    hooked up!” She is happy that I want to know,
    and proud of wearing a little transmitter—not
    unlike being an opera singer—
    a link to those who wish her pleasure and long
    life. Oh I have my mother on a leash.
    Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth?
    When the morning stars sang together?
    I was there, with my mother.
4. Two Late Dialogues
Mom as Comet
    How do they know that it won’t decide
    to turn and come this way?!
my mother,
    at 82, points out.
They think
    they’re soooo clever, giving it that funny
    name no one can remember, but how do they
    know that whatever’s behind it wont suddenly
    aim it at us? It’s big, I mean
    It’s Oh-ho-HO!
I see, I said,
    yes … You think someone’s running it?
Not
    SOMEONE,
she scathed,
not a person: a force,
    a nameless force!
But she could see that I did not
    get it, that inhuman powers,
    out of control, can kill you. So my mom,
    who used to sleep with masking tape
    stuck to her brow, to prevent wrinkles,
    transmogrified her face, and became—
    by slewing her mouth this way and that,
    and rolling her eyes, and letting her head
    wobble as her shoulders swayed back and forth
    —Hale-Bopp. She looked like a comic actor
    doing a drunk, she looked like a tough
    kid on a corner, amusing the others,
    a person with an identity,
    who could play, enacting her own wild mother
    veering toward her, or her father, falling
    to his accidental death, or my father
    lurching at her, or the wave of death
    toppling her second husband, or her own
    death, somewhere, its maw pulling
    from side to side, its eyes unfocused,
    hurtling toward her, an error, a