about the day you met. In this world you wake up

before she does, make her coffee, read her horoscope

and forget to read your own. Where you stand behind her

when she looks in the mirror, tell her she’s grown

more gorgeous every one of her sixty-seven years,

how you feel like the richest man in town

with your hands in the silver

of her hair. In this world I celebrate the news

of you having a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece.

In this world I don’t panic when I see a pink tricycle

in your neighbor’s driveway

as I’m driving to meet friends at the riverfront,

my hometown still a home you never haunted.

I roll the window down, holler your name

into the autumn air. You look up

from raking a pile of golden leaves, smile

and wave back to me. Can you see it?

I know you can. Everyone can

see who they were supposed to be.

It’s the readiest grief in the world.

WHAT CAN’T BE TAKEN

Trauma was not being

able to get the hands

of the clock off me.

Healing was learning

no one has ever laid a fingerprint

on the part of me that’s infinite.

THE TEST OF TIME

I am twenty years old and my mother has just been diagnosed

with a disease that is beginning to paralyze her.

She holds my hand on the couch and tells me

the disease is hereditary. Runs through family trees

until no one runs again. With the diagnosis, she finally knows

why her favorite aunt spent the second half of her life

in a wheelchair. Why her father’s gait began to change

before he died too young for his doctor to uncover the reason.

I’m twenty years old and there is a test I can take

to find out if the disease has been coded in my DNA,

if I’ll be able to do the two-step in my genes

on a dance floor two decades from now.

The test is a psychic. A crystal ball. A tarot reading

from the edge of a cliff from which I may or may not fall.

I’m twenty years old and I’ve always been afraid

of the Ouija board. When someone asks how I will die,

my fingers dive off the board and into my pockets

like, Can’t we please let god keep her secrets?

My whole life I’ve known my mother

as the town walker. Ever since my bike had training wheels,

I’ve been riding beside her every night at dusk.

She walks for miles, a smile on her face

that turns on the porch light of every house

she passes. I don’t burden her

with asking what she would do,

if she would have wanted to know she’d hit forty

and forty would hit her back, a baseball bat to the knees,

her life as she knew it giving out beneath her.

I’m twenty years old and I haven’t met

any of my disabled friends yet,