Daughter’s Journey

The most important thing, I believed, 

was to follow my mother into Alzheimers.

With my own life, to carry her back.

I found myself in a street 

where the signs were maps by worms.  

My feet vanished.  

Every key I found sealed another door. 

I sang my heart out, 

but my mother was hidden in silence. 

I found beauty in the patient eyes of the dying. 

I followed the traces of everyone 

exiled in dementia, the old women, 

cobweb flesh on bones that had forgotten how 

to hold up a sunlit roof. 

I followed the maze of wrinkles 

on puzzled foreheads. 

I found them underground in the moon 

without entry or exit. Without air.

I followed my birth backwards

until I circled in a narrowing cell of grief. 

But my vigor’s ferocity 

pulled life’s vivid wind into my need. 

And when my mother’s eyelids flattened, 

and her spirit floated away

on death’s twilight thermals,

I got up. I walked away.

I know I ripped a hole in my own house.

I descended to the street,

to the open winter, forgetting 

my heaviness, my fury, my flesh.