I tell the man: She is long in the tooth.
I say how far she’s come,
and the telling takes six digits.
When she runs a fever, it’s tougher
these days to cool her down.
Her gears don’t shift smooth
like they used to. Her idle’s rougher.
I have to decide whether to spring
for a treatment to give her more bang,
and a filter to keep out all the bad
in the air, and a new belt, serpentine,
threading rhythm through her bits.
In months, it’s the most attention she’s had.
But it’s brief. Then the hood shuts with a clang.

I saw how she felt, so I sang along.
Not like before, when I wanted the sick
one to follow my cheerful tune. This time
I let the rhythm slow, eschewed the trick

of insisting she’ll be okay. What if the bone
doesn’t heal? What if the rungs of the spine
don’t reknit? I didn’t ask this, understand.
I just unfrowned my brow and took her hand.

She stroked mine, too, said, “Have you
ever seen anything as pretty?” and
of my love, “Is he not the sweetest man?”
We rang the bedside bell. In a few,

a nurse arrived to dose her under once
more. Her gaze went blank for the nonce.

Eating the leftover wine-and-tomato pot roast
that your mother set, finished, on the stove
five minutes before her accident last night,
along with the potatoes she had prepped and peeled
(and which you cooked and mashed
tonight, while she lay in a hospital bed).
It’s very rich. But it’s also like tasting Before.
It’s like tasting What If.

By the next time you read this, we
will be two different people: me now,
who doesn’t know, and you then,

who do. Whatever happens, over time
you’ll forget, then invent the particulars.
You will wonder what I was thinking

at this moment, as I am wondering
at this moment what you already know:
Did she make it? Did she die?

This is not one of those poems
where the speaker imagines herself
back in that key scene. This is a poem

where that key scene is now:
the speaker is here, me, neck-deep
in these words, and my mother is

in an ambulance, on the way to the hospital,
having rolled and then been flung out
of a vehicle. The poem is happening

even as I type this. The poem is the question:
Will she live to be teased about her tumble?
Will the vegetable soup I made tonight

turn our stomach, that dish never to be
made again, its memories soured forever?
If she goes, how will your stories about her

begin to turn to lies? Because they will.
You will not be able to stop it. All I can
give you is this moment, which you can read

again after whatever happens happens:
Hello. It’s me. This is the present.
Your mother exists on this earth,

in pain, in slurred words, in a neck brace,
moving at eighty miles per hour
on a gurney in the back of

a loud, red-flashing truck.
The pot roast she made this afternoon
for your father still sits, even now,

warm in its pot on the stove.

My half of our kitchen goes
with me when I leave.

I keep the good vanilla.
You keep the root-bound tabasco.

You get the water smoker.
I get the five-quart Le Creuset.

I eat the tomato pulp you never
wanted: salted, seeded, olive-oiled,

it slithers down my throat
like summer’s own warm tongue.

The batter was always yours;
today I scrape down the bowl, scour it

for any dark and lingering sweetness,
swallow the uncooked eggs, tempt

fate. You gobbled the fruits of my labor
so now I take my cut: a few toasted nuts,

dusty chocolate shavings, raw dough,
peppered potato ends. I glean what

I can eke from whatever’s left.
You see a picked carcass; I see the heft

of sweet and tender chicken oysters
tucked near the backbone. I take them, too.

In French they’re called le sot-l’y-laisse,
which translates “only the fool leaves it.”

In a world without wafting there is no joy
at the dinner table. There is no first, then
lingering note, but only the bare markers:
salt, sweet, sour, bitter. I cannot perceive
subtleties. The scent of my love’s skin is
gone, though it still feels near and warm,
its sweetness filed away in my memory.

You need christening
with an apter name.
Just past each new year

your blooms pipe
fluted butter dots
up their stark stems

at the first, false thaw.
Every year I see
their dogged cheer

and my breath catches.
Oh, my dear

impetuous ones, I dub you
not yet, not yet.

I am storing up long nights of misery.
I guess I’m not sorry. We are having
a very serious conversation at the party.
However you came to pick me, it’s important
sometimes to be had. You find it very fun
to sass me. I am learning to take it.
I am half delighted and half a long time.
I am half frightened and half hour.
Anticlimax should peel off easily, and
cleanup will involve merely a writer.
Last night in my own archetypal material
Yeats invented himself. I am reading stanzas
from the person who distrusted his heart.
Yet worse if they were not intended.
And that’s how sophisticated our operating
systems become. I am listening
to everything, the excess of it

Look, I mean, let’s dig holes everywhere.
Under his house I’ve a hunch there’s a girl.
I am nasty, malty, full of red. My first few draws
on what comes out, what lies behind:
you become smaller, quieter, remove
the offensive, excessive parts. So
which is your life? I am destined to be
terrible. I definitely need police tape around me.
I am often these pairs. Genuineness only
thrives in Oz. I am ashamed to say that.
If we could only cut off our childhood places.

Moon like a last spring’s leaf
caught in the highest branch of
the backyard silver maple

Orion’s belt
cinches the neighbor’s tree
to ours

Half-finished puzzle on the kitchen
table under plexiglas – edges done,
glass of bourbon over it

Grill grates black with
last summer’s zucchini char

Thursday’s snow won’t melt
till Tuesday

Working the duvet into its
flannel cover, like putting on
my black tights in the morning

The cat squints happily.
The tub drips.
We strip to nothing

breathless from the weight
of extra blankets