My Mother’s Treasures
The remains of last year’s cosmos
that bloomed so gloriously orange in the summer sun
wait for me in the back garden.
I easily pull up the dead husks,
shriveled leaves and brittle stems,
almost weightless in my hands,
unlike my mother’s treasures.
A body and tail of cometary proportions –
nine decades of stuff -
is wedged into three garages,
one large Pueblo-style house, and
one small condominium.
Frailty has forced her into a foundering orbit.
She must set all but the essential free,
free to drift into the orbit of family, friends, strangers.
For her this is nothing less than a rupture of the self -
a severed hand, blinded eye, mutilated breast.
I want to gather her up, comfort her, reassure her.
She is inconsolable for now, but she has mastered
greater challenges in the past.
I put my faith in her resilience as we clear the ground,
making way for the seeds of her past
to take root and bloom in someone else’s garden.
Patricia Wentzel lives in Sacramento, California at the confluence of two rivers with her family and their cats. She is active in her local poetry community to whom she owes a huge debt of gratitude. She has previously been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Light Ekphrastic, and has work forthcoming in the Tule Review and Right Hand Pointing.
The remains of last year’s cosmos
that bloomed so gloriously orange in the summer sun
wait for me in the back garden.
I easily pull up the dead husks,
shriveled leaves and brittle stems,
almost weightless in my hands,
unlike my mother’s treasures.
A body and tail of cometary proportions –
nine decades of stuff -
is wedged into three garages,
one large Pueblo-style house, and
one small condominium.
Frailty has forced her into a foundering orbit.
She must set all but the essential free,
free to drift into the orbit of family, friends, strangers.
For her this is nothing less than a rupture of the self -
a severed hand, blinded eye, mutilated breast.
I want to gather her up, comfort her, reassure her.
She is inconsolable for now, but she has mastered
greater challenges in the past.
I put my faith in her resilience as we clear the ground,
making way for the seeds of her past
to take root and bloom in someone else’s garden.
Patricia Wentzel lives in Sacramento, California at the confluence of two rivers with her family and their cats. She is active in her local poetry community to whom she owes a huge debt of gratitude. She has previously been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Light Ekphrastic, and has work forthcoming in the Tule Review and Right Hand Pointing.