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By the end of the morning,
you will have set out over Snoqualmie to Highway 18,
past Kent,along the northeast side of Auburn
where the home of your childhood
and your dear father tend to show their subtle frailties
in time for your return,
and a first Christmas without your mother.
Along the way, as you break over the summit
into a valley rivered with snow-crusted Cedar
all feathered out in chrome green, closing the road
in behind you, you might rehearse your acceptance
of the way things are now.
You might even rationalize
the way the summer months had slipped by you
like Debra's silent strength in the week of her passing,
like some strange, pleasant breeze
blowing her back over distance. Or how,
when back in April,
outside Intensive Care,
your grandmother and you discussed angels, a peaceful passing,
a better place; you built promises about healing together.
Here is where we tend
to examine our own simple existences: journey to wherever
the dialogue moves. But for now,
as we load boxes and clothes
into your Blazer, a jug of laundry soap, an envelope of photographs
from a trip to California - all of mom and grandma laughing - you talk of more
facts.
There was honesty and fear, you say, in how slight she looked
against the hospital sheets,
against the ventilator
and all its web of tubes cradling her last existence
long enough to see her daughter: her Lilac, her Rose.
And how, for the longest time,
your tears cocooned you inside yourself,
creating a shell of confusion to which answers must figure
on the other side of eternity,
where the echoes of our rehearsals sound like frailty
under snow-dusted trees.
Yet how am I to understand this lost dialogue you
move through alone in shoeboxes of cards and letters, in pictures,
in her favorite rings?
I'm alone now too and can not get inside.
I can not hear you answer your own questions -
something like, will you brush my hair, Shawna,
meaning: won't you stand with me
along the summit rim? Or please don't look at me Shawna,
meaning: take my hand and walk me to the edge of the world?
MOVING ON
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