Time Machine
On August 17, 1991, my mother's life narrowed to a time capsule:
gone the half-century resentments, unpurged anger, captiousness.
Gone her disprizing me, my wife, our children.
Only now this instrument--stroke, brain-storm--that mostly robbed her
of the present, took her back to her older sisters, all dead, to her brother
(barely alive) with whom she'd walk in 1925
to the subway on Friday nights,
leave behind the fur cutting room, go
home to the Bronx for their mother's Shabbos dinner.
But no stopping there: momentary happiness perhaps,
oblivion in remembering life before my father, before me,
before anyone who hurt her: but imperfect joy,
for one morning I visit in the nursing home
and she begins to cry.
"What's wrong, mom?" asks the dutiful son.
"Everything!" cries the mother who has seen perhaps
the terrible shape in the corner that in two weeks' time
will enter the capsule too, the better to embrace her.
Ken/6-30-05
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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