After her mother died
I started saving every scrap of paper
with my mother’s handwriting on it:
little notes, postcards, random directions
inside used matchbooks, dates scrawled
in afterthought on black-and-white snapshots.

I had seen my grandmother
deep in sickness: tubes slinking out from under
the white gown, her slack skin yellow
and purple in patches, her mouth thin,
heaving past consciousness for the stale
hospital air. At the mortuary

I saw my mother looking as if the breath
had been pressed from her: she stood there staring,
not sure how to move in a world without
her mother in it. Right then I looked at her name
in the guest register: its steady, mature cursive,
strokes and loops I’d never really

seen before. I could not imagine the one whose hands
had held the pen wasted, and then laid out
like that. I did not want to. I do not want to
ever not see her before me—talking with, looking
at or away from me. I watch my futility
pile to the ceiling: scribbled-on receipts and old address books

rising around me, though they do not protect me…Those inky curves
will not replace her unbreathing body—even the opened
envelope-flaps her living tongue has passed across.