Brush Strokes on eighty
Paint stroke #1
a shock of alone
arrives in late evening
when there’s chill on the house
and silence lingers with cobwebs,
it doesn’t startle, doesn’t break open,
it stands still, face to me, stark
but alive and assured
seven beats of frozen silence
facing my self’s new countenance
reflected back in alone’s solid stance
i let go daily, but cannot revive lost loves,
cannot embody my disappeared agility,
standing side by jowl with another
does not assuage this solitary singleness
i am alone
my attentive children surround me
with pleasures of inclusion
but i live a secret
they cannot share
i am alone
and we have settled in together
Paint stroke #2
She turned back from the curb
a house
her house
forty years ago a middle age woman
wedded again with a new marriage bed
a new garden, new habits to build
twenty years ago, he took
his final leave, stolen from her
from the inside out,
snatching breath, fraying their life,
the slowness of the rip
still burns along the edges
ten years ago, she can see it still,
collective concern for her public fall,
she pushed against their good intentions
cutting into her days, ragged remains of her time
accidental lacerations to ego still tender,
she leans against the car defeated
the precious nest that enfolded her life
worn bare to the borders of the porch
the screen door aslant on loose hinges
dingy drapes still hanging dutifully
furniture dissolving like hunks of bread
as she opens the car door she can’t look back
Remember, ‘retirement’ home,
not hospice! She repeats over and over
as her daughter slips through traffic
up over the only big hill in town
and down onto the oneway drive
delivering her to the end of her ride
Paint stroke #3
we watched my genial mother-in-law
mutate every hour she stayed alive
into ripe resentment of what
the years had brought her to,
she sat silent and angry
in the midst of the children
she had made a life of,
she refused to embrace
alone, who
she knew
had stolen
so much away
from her
but now with my own visit
from alone,
i opened the door
instinctively
let her in
nakedly unprepared
she has come
not as guest
but as new inmate,
she brings
nothing with her
she leaves no footprint
she is alone.
© Sharon Lopez Mooney, “Brush Strokes on Eighty”, originally published in the Cold Lake Anthology 2023, Burlington Writers Workshop, Vermont, 2023