Flesh Remembers

In private, she ends her public presence 
she, once called mother,
falls out of her name
and leaves 
the way a door invites an out—
framed, open, immovable, 
never itself the leaving.

She has left into the skin 
of everything that breathes
not just raising me
but releasing herself into me.

They told us at the burial
she had gone ahead
but I felt her double back,
sensed her
in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday,
in the steam rising from a pot of rice,
sometimes sideways peeking 
from a shadow in morning light 
touching the back of my hand.
I find her often
in the particular blue
of late October sky
hearing her wind-whisper 
“look, baby, look at that”
as if beauty 
were doing something
just for us.

She is in the bending
She is in returns
branches buckling under winter-ice,
lifting again 
in the poise of spring.

she has joined 
ancestors making time elastic
not just with memory
as she is still in the making of me
but one more witness to attention
one more pair of hands in practice 
willing to hold what’s heavy
with legacy
from when her body dropped
not yet stopped from speaking,
because in me 
she is still arriving