Annie McBride

When my father died we took in boarders,

old wives, widowers to bide their time.

Wakened by my mother after midnight,

I stood with her outside the bathroom door.

“She said she was feeling ill,” my mother said.

I opened it and went inside. She was

standing by the sink. Tiny wraith in gown

and thinning hair. She looked up at me and smiled,

then drifted into my arms and died.

I carried her weightless to her room,

laid her on her bed, which smelled of sachet

and age. Her gentle rattle startled me.

A year of falling leaves. The cold bricks

of Germantown were leading nowhere.

Now I am as old as she was when she went.

The rings slide off so easily, at night.

Her weightlessness is almost more than I can bear,

such a wordless thing to have carried around.

When I went back a lifetime later,

everything had shrunk, the house, the room.

They’d taken up the bricks and cut the trees.

London, I recall, had not yet begun

to burn, and I, small Heracles, stood braced

waiting for the whole wide blazing world.