False Elegy
I sometimes feel as if my mother has died and I’m free
to reminisce her final months. My voice may convey the card-
board tragedy of her figure, flattened by circumstance and by long
years among the poor, heads shaking at her utterances.
Will I ever long for the sound of her voice
on my phone calling me a childhood nickname?
Will my own loneliness become so thick I will reach
for the phone although it hasn’t rung?
Cadmium index and thumb prints on the porcelain
and the bathroom faucets. Folger’s tub of soaking brushes
in the sink. Was the dun hall of her subsidized apartment
a metaphorical fall, a chute to the slaughterman’s hammer?
Her last collage is Charon ferrying souls across River Styx.
People careen over precarious gunwales, mouths cut
from glossy magazines, screaming in protest and fear
as Charon smiles a red invitation. All those mouths!
If his craft is overcrowded, Charon doesn’t care,
gold coins bulge his back pocket. The pole is in his hands.
I can recognize his smile as my own smile, ingratiating,
self-satisfied, Clinique cherry saline.
I know, too, that she knew I would know as my own
his even teeth’s hysterical toothpaste white
as she glued over his white face glued
to her cardboard’s uncaring field.
