At this moment,
I have been alive
sixty years,
seven months,
twenty-six days,
twelve hours
and twenty minutes.

In all that time, I have never been a motherless child.
That status will soon change.

A new poetry journal arrived in the mail yesterday
and the first poems I read
were by poets grieving
for mothers who had died.
I felt the universe open a little wider.

We are dancing the dance
of the in-between-
light and shadow,
this room
and the place of angels.

Why is it that on first writing, I write
Angles
and not
Angels.

Restless,
my spirit moves from room to room
as I sit next to her bed
in stillness.

The dying regard the standard conventions of etiquette
of not much use when going about the business
of dying.
The lessons she teaches
to the very end,
always my mother.