A Distance of Sixty-one Light-years
For fifty years my mother’s bones lay still
above the Mohawk’s blue and sun-streaked line.
They don't hear the wind whining up the hill,
or hopeful birds, or cheerless songs of mine.
They wouldn't know the one she used to call
“the shy one in the corner of the hall.”
Long past her age, and with each July,
I've grown more gray and wrinkled (but still shy.)
It’s good she never sees in her repose
the deeper hole in which I've dug myself:
the stark result of dreaming, I suppose,
with half a century of dust left on the shelf.
It’s just as well that separation hides
the tacit disappointment on both sides.
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