It proves that what is most expendable
in your poetry is beneficial to it.
It proves that now cannot
catch up to itself later.
It proves that you will never be happy again.
In what you are writing or what you are saying?
Now you go backwards when you go forward—
not dreaming on the bus, but almost that literally.
It was winter when she died and your tooth-
extraction then was unexpected, too.
You traveled by way of mundane roads
inland to a strange place (hospice)
where she was. A last goodbye is impossible.
You finished a race in the middle of the pack.
It was as if she were saying, you are not
special, you are not my boy, because
I am leaving you. Why didn’t they tell us?
Why didn’t they? Life is no longer life
when your mother dies.