MY MOTHER AFTER HER SECOND STROKE

When I call her on her eighty-sixth birthday, her words

come out slanted, complete within themselves, 

but unattached to any discernible subject or reference point. 

They rise like invisible threads into the air, circling, 

lingering, then going their separate ways. 

Sometimes she pauses, longer than expected,

as though trying to re-enter the doorway of thought. 

Sometimes a sound takes the place for a word or phrase. 

Her speech has become a palimpsest of sorts, 

her stories overlapping in time, ignoring the rules of 

present and past tense, refusing to stay put.

She speaks of her sister, gone now for decades, 

paying a visit, how they laughed and ordered chow mein. 

She tells me that her mother, my Grandma Artie, 

is sleeping in her room with her, an arrangement that 

she seems to find both comforting and amusing. 

"I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me," 

she says in wonder, "but she's right here."

She tells me how they drove out to the old house 

on Western together, as though not a year had passed. 

"What do you think about that?," she asks, though 

it's less of a question and more an exclamation. 

I ask her what she thinks of it, then add that I'm happy 

they're getting this time together. She agrees.

But sleep is never far off, and she is tired again. 

Still, I hope there are one or two more stories to be told,

in whatever form. I will do my best to follow.

MY MOTHER AT EIGHTY-SIX, RECOVERING FROM AN ISCHEMIC STROKE

 

This isn't the first time she has left this way -- hovering between sleep and awake, speech and silence, breath and no breath. When we were kids, the pills and the Stoli nearly washed her away, bringing her only partway back. The ECT and barbiturates softened her eyes to a blue-tinged fog, a weather we could not grasp. But this time she seems closer to the further shore, more resigned to stand among its trees and shadow. Her body sleeps on one side, like a child nuzzling closely in the first chill of autumn. The words that come now, if they come at all, tumble out in fragments, like the torn scripture of some long lost gospel. They break free of source and context, uncertain but continuing, trailing off like the memories she has spent a lifetime trying to erase. This woman, stubborn as the sun and moon, whose version of Jesus brandished a sword toward the open sky, offers neither confession nor consolation. She travels silently on wheels now, waiting without expression for her lunch and medication, for whatever can be easily recognized, waiting for her own version of leaving to return.