Mathematics of Grief

Karolyn buys three jumping spiders

from a masked woman in a parking lot

so that she is not the only living being

in her mother’s house.

When she comes back home next month

San Francisco will be the only place named home.

Pledge spiritual fealty to SF drag queens, yes,

swim far to the far coast,

but Louisville, Kentucky was the undertow.

Back there, there was always

a place to sleep, a car to drive, food in the fridge.

Her mother. There was always her mother.

Karolyn says, anything she does not take now

from her mother’s house

will not exist.

When your mom goes. Passes. Passes away.

(No one says dies.)

Dorothy plots quitting her job again:

I thought I was fine

but I’m really not.

I tell her, it won’t be linear.

Do I mean geometric, algebraic?

It’ll be a bumpy line of 1970s rickrack

ridges and troughs.

Sound Translation

In my sister Isolde’s car crossing the Bay Bridge,

we are two adults and two children, masked.

Driving to our mom’s driveway,

Thanksgiving 2020, we will outdoor-gather,

we will household-mingle, for the first time.

In the passenger seat I’ve got my camera out,

photographing her, the sky, 360-degree stimuli:

Isolde, two feet away, not through a computer screen!

Velocity of billboards and blue sky and needlenosed buildings

coming at me through the windshield,

so much bigger than laptop Netflix!

I’m taking pictures of the steel beams overhead

and banditface selfies in the side mirror as we rush eastward;

windows rolled down whip my words away as I say

I haven’t seen water in a while.

This whole year I’d only walked, no trains cars or buses.

Landlocked in a coastal city. Neighboring cities

turned stagecoach distant, turned future tense.

After a pause (she always pauses before she speaks,

like our father, how this tic of an inheritance

when he never lived with us?) she says

Yes, you haven’t seen her since March.

I say water, she hears mother.

Our mother, the water,

universal,

larger than the bay, the sea, the tide.

our mother the water the water the mother

watermother motherwater la mère la mer

themotherthesea the mother sees

mother mother

Mother?

Thanksgiving. Lap dinner on the steps

at the top of the steep driveway

three small sororal households

stationed ten feet apart.

We wave and Andy makes a joke and

the kids fall off plastic chairs and

I spritz rubbing alcohol on my mother’s hands

and she pours us champagne.

I’m so happy I’m crying.

Thanksgiving. A few weeks back

Karolyn’s mom told the nurse

she wouldn’t be here for Thanksgiving

and she wasn’t.

She passed the night before.

Thanksgiving.

Karolyn’s first day

motherless.

Dorothy’s first holiday

alone here.

Alyx’s first holiday

not anywhere.

Towards the end, once,

Karolyn’s mom didn’t recognize her.

Hearing that, I feel crumpled.

Please forget this last bit, lethe waters rising.

You don’t want to know

that your mother does not know you.

Remove. Roll back.

Only a dream,

not the true true.