Dogwood leaves like seagulls flying
over the ocean at sunset at the Cannon
Beach art gallery before we head out
to climb Haystack Rock at low tide,
orange and purple seastars pasted
to the rocks and alounge in punchbowls
in the sand, sea gray reflecting gray
sky like today in Seattle where this
dogwood buds on borrowed time if
we open this window to a door to
a garage. Pink clematis has grown over
Japanese maple and waves like a beauty
queen at each wind waft as Rabanco
back up beeps overwhelm robins. They
tell us it will be summer this weekend,
then back into darkness according to
today's P.I. pictograms. Rhododendron
leaves pump up and down like a small
child's toy and I miss having children
which I remember as making paste
and mudpies, trips to aquarium and zoo,
animated movies and shopping for shoes.

Aging is a honing process, the best shorn
from the lamb cylinder earlier in the gyro
so that now we're talking about my mom
on Mothers Day when my daughter and I
took her to lunch. She is so weighted with
regret and longing and inaction she can
barely move, hates the cane she needs to
stand up out of the front seat of the car.
As we headed out the front walk she
called out to neighbors across the street
who disappeared silently into their dark
garage. We all noticed and said nothing.
The area's changed, they could be rude
or crackheads, not making a comment
about her. "When I can walk again," she
told us angrily, almost 83, dropped her
sad moot point. She grimaced over her
salad so that we worried she'd bitten
down on an olive pit, launched a story
that meandered into another story and
another, each starring a new person,
we have met none of them, it was a single
tale with wave after wave of unhappy
endings. The protagonist tries hard,
meets calamity, and fails, and we were
Pilgrims thrown again and again into
the Slough of Despond, between which
there were interludes of remade history
where my brother wasn't mentally ill and
she wasn't responsible for abandoning him
because He's A Good Man though he has
a problem picking up good deals on eBay
so that he's had to sell his drum set and his
red tractor he bought to work the yardwide
plot of Montana land he owns until, look at
the time! we left her off and went home.