This poem is for my two adopted grandmothers
My two temporal angels
For four years of traded stories
On advice highways
Four years of volunteering once a week
At the retirement home
This poem is for Rita
We met in the common room
The steady buzz of your wheelchair
Phone attached to necklace slung
Around your body as a gun is to a returning soldier
How we spoke little but communicated constantly
Carving faculties between
Our age-disparate hands
We spoke through Scrabble
Your body may have been weak
Your body may have betrayed you
But your mind found words
Like the most skilled of archeologists
I think, what I admired most was that you never settled
You pushed me always
That a better word could be found
Excavated from the canyon with trembling fingertips
You won every game we ever played
But you taught me to enjoy the process
Appealing to the mountain, not its peak
You brought me in
And This poem is for Faith
Your voice like liquid honey
Amber thick
Drizzled into caverns of sweeping sound
Your room always felt like a home
Paintings and sculptures intermittent
With records and stereos
It didn’t surprise me when you told me you were a Jazz singer
Because your music still echoed
In your footsteps
Now assisted by a cane
And your lungs were
I imagine
Gusty like the broad strokes of an eagle
Shooting into the sky
Music was always playing when I visited you
Vivid scenery to our conversation
You would pause a new song swelled
Painting in side notes about
Pitch and timbre, and breath
You taught me how to breathe
How to breathe to fill an entire room
For my sixteenth birthday
You gave me voice lessons
With you
I regret now that I didn’t take you up on them sooner
Because
Rita
Faith
I’m what’s left of our long afternoons
Of our weekly rituals
I’m the only one who remembers
I didn’t say goodbye to either of you
Because I was taught
When you stop
You start again
But we didn’t start again
At sixteen
death is a galaxy
Just beyond what I can see
My own mortality is a balloon strapped onto my shoulders
I didn’t see yours shrinking
I didn’t see the collision
Galactic torpedo
What would I do for one more afternoon with you
Backpack heavy on my shoulders
As I knocked on your door once more
Heard the faint “coming” as I shifted on my feet
Greeted you with a hug and a kiss on the cheek
There’s so much I would have said to you
I would have made you tell me everything
I always knew our time together
Bridge of generations
Was constrained
by time and fate and health
But I expect the rope to fray, not snap
Expectantly,
I expected you still here.
This poem is for my two adopted grandmothers
My two temporal angels
This poem is a thank you
Thank you Rita
Thank you Faith
This poem is also a goodbye