She’s
teaching me to be old:
With
every Thank you uttered
To
every nurse who draws her blood;
With
every reassurance
That
everything is good;
With
every stifled groan
She
can’t remember to repress;
With
every single visitor
Who
comes with old regrets.
She’s
teaching me how the body
Swallows
up itself:
How
the mind can lose the past
But
not civility;
How
the shriveled skin
Can
still hold tight;
How
the smallness of a frame
Can
recede and shrink and fade.
She’s
teaching me the art of the end,
Of
slipping away,
A
lesson I’ll only remember
As
long as there’s no need.
But
I’m studying hard,
Trying
to learn the softness of the language,
So
maybe something here will help me there someday
When
my own body begins to turn away,
When
she is gone and someone uninitiated
Tries
to set me right—
And
I’m retelling stories of this night,
And
they know it might have happened,
The
way I know she might have loved
Playing
basketball when she was twenty-three
(At
five foot nothing)—
The
only thing she can recall from the eighty years she’s known.
We
must not get to pick our memories,
So
I know this useful one will go,
And
I’ll likely only know the day I sledded in the snow,
Forgetting
who was there and where I was but not that I was thirty-three
Or
the wind-chapped sting of glee
As
gravity pulled me
So
hard away from home.
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