she made another year

Enjoying the spazz of the third drink
I have come to relish in hours apart,
this is moderation enough
and the view from over the brim
of the glass,
made these lines not about
my indulgences or my drink.
I seriously think she’s
at a stage of dying,
but the slower kind,
the one that the quickness
of youth reminds you of,
when neither left nor right foot
can move
to where you want them to.
When you want to speak
but words have become a task
for you to form,
when you wait for the sun
to burst through
but it never comes,
and that’s always
bad news for arthritis.
I would write this for her,
but she would never
value it as much as her
own independence,
she is already small and frail
and now bears
too much a resemblance to death.
But this is New Years morning,
not a day for tablet-taking
so get this lady a drink,
she wants a drink
but she cannot hold the bottle
to pour without breaking the glass,
so now we clean up the broken shards,
while glass forms in her eyes,
she holds them in
and I’m sitting next to her
so she can’t hide her tears.
The only thing that calls her back
at intervals are the
séances of soaps
she would take-in religiously,
and yes watching the t.v.
has become her religion
as three or four rosaries
catch cobweb and dreams
as they hang from the bed-post,
and this is how she would spend most of her days.
Her friends always
send bouquets of flowers;
this is probably the way
that an old woman prepares for her last.
She must be unhappy,
the world is moving too fast
and doesn’t pause for her steps
to even pronounce themselves,
while her children number her virtues
and spell the message out
for those slower at reading signs.
But whenever she does die,
I would not mourn her loss,
but shed my own fears
that I would ever have to cross
the same pathway she is walking over.
And every time she hugs me
she reminds me that she’s dying
and in each second getting older
And that this one might be the last.