Departure
       

Two months ago, I scribbled poem notes on hospital paper towels—
        my mother dying, snowed on morphine, pneumonic lungs sinking
                boats she wanted no one to bail out. Her small hands inflated twice
                        their size as if to keep afloat. The echocardiogram detailed

                        a scalloped shell of aortic waves, mitral valve murmurations.
                How many secrets did her starlings harbor?
        To mark each changing hour, Pegasus, nailed midflight
on the beige wall, shook his mane from side to side.

I consulted the meadow priests of purple thistle whose prickly
        heads provided no comfort. They said, Death is a circling
                wolf. There will be no one left to call you by your full name.
                        Grief falls in rain-whipped sheets; the shadows of the dead

                        weigh more than you know. I looked to the night sky
                for a comet tail, but only cold stars stared back, unblinking.
        That month my mother died, I did not bleed and the tips of my hair
wintered. A book finished inside me; my ink tongue froze.

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Copyright © 2021 Kelly Cressio-Moeller All rights reserved
from Shade of Blue Trees
Two Sylvias Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission