thinking of my mother

AN OLD WOMAN                                                                         

       

The past has come apart
events are vagueing
the future is a seedless pod
the present pain.

Not even pain has that precision
with which it struck youth.

Years like moths
erode internal organs
hanging or falling
in a spoiled closet.

Does your mirror bedevil you?
Or is the impossible
possible to senility?

How could the erstwhile
agile and slim self--
that narrow silhouette--
come to contain
this huge incognito--
this bulbous stranger--
only to be exorcised by death?

Dilation has entirely dominated
your long reality.




                                 Mina Loy