By Britney Wells
Like snow driven over great lakes,
your children turn to leave, one by one,
chins high, arms folded, tall strangers,
under awkward flickering:
the cheap fluorescent lights
of the garage.
They throw out the word goodbye like it is
an old sweater. They do not remember
what you remember: them
beneath your stretched-thin skin, the rapid
division of their cells, your blossoming
with the very swell of their bodies, with their minds
that now decide to leave,
and your hands,
full like wells in April,
cradling their bobbing heads above
the surface of warm water,
their not-yet-blue blinking eyes
looking up like stars content in their sphere.
How warm it was, that which they do not
recall: raisin-like palms under their sudsy tufts of hair,
those days when the beginnings of them moved
under a pulsing roof of heart and lungs,
their only sky, your burgeoning world.
As they turn to go, their long black shadows
are ice cubes down your back, the
blur of their scramble, a fog.
And with the click of a button, plastic,
garage doors spread wide to deliver them up.
The exhaust of their engines is a stiff wind,
but music blaring from open windows
sings that it is time.
