Say Your Mother Returned From Death
Or maybe she’s been hanging out on Willie Nelson’s
tour bus all this time, drinking coffee and sucking in
second hand weed because someone just gave him
a new bong to try out. Say she came back from visiting
an old crush she looked up after your dad died,
every few weeks a new letter arriving, eight pages
at least. She’s back and there’s this pandemic going on,
and she calls every two hours, even at one a.m., because
she heard that someone died in a car accident ten miles
from where you live, and she wonders if it was you
or anyone you know, that her neighbor’s coughing and now
she’s infected. Maybe you planned a museum date
to see the new Warhol exhibition with your daughter,
just the two of you — and she knows, your mother does –
and she calls, wants a ride to the hospital,
or at least urgent care to see about her toe,
the one she rolled over with the wheel of her chair
because she won’t wear shoes. Maybe it’s Mother’s
Day, and she’s been dead two and a half years,
and it’s 9:30 in the evening and she’s calling. You know
she’s still a Trump supporter, can imagine her buying
two MAGA hats and dressing up one of her dozens
of stuffed bears, the one wearing the Willie bandana
and Mardi Gras beads, the one with two hundred
dollars in the battery pack pocket of its fuzzy butt,
and she forgets that shade of green you get when you see
Donny T’s face on the screen. You register for a retreat
where the internet is dodgy, and she calls the night before,
the morning of. You wait two hours at the clinic
where they dress her toe with gauze and light bandages,
then drive yourself like a crazy woman to the cabin, silence
your phone, serve yourself some extra wine, and then
another glass after that. Sometimes you put the world under
blacklight, see if you can see what it is you can’t see.
A teacup jumps off its hook, someone makes a loaf of bread
fly off the bakery shelf, someone else steals the backstage passes
to Willie’s concert at the casino, and you say Oh,
that’s my mother, she’s knows we’re talking about her,
just like you know about those two dead cats
she slept with all those years, those two invisible cats —
one behind her knees, the other curled up under her chin,
a tiny commiseration, a small compensation.