Lately They Have Been Telling Me

Rick Kempa Lately They Have Been Telling Me

Lately they have been telling me not to call my mother, suggesting without saying that certain calls at certain times from certain persons

serve only to agitate, to make my mother too painfully aware of where she’s not and whom she is not with.

I rail and I pound my fist— No one has the right to tell me this! I find her in that panic, I don’t trigger it.

But after another and another event: her breathless voice— Rick! Thank god! Come get me now!—

My powerlessness to take her to a safer place, to conjure memories or promise pleasures, interrupting finally,

I love you mom, but I’ve got to go, and then calling the nursing station— my mom needs help!— after such turbulence

at last I get it: the emptiness when she’s sitting in the dark on the edge of her bed in her room in the utter quiet is not tragic, it is a calmness, a silence that the shrill phone shatters. She clutches

it, she clutches at the sound of someone once intensely loved but of late forgotten, Hey mom, it’s me!

and once again all is lost. And so her grandson hits a home run, and there is silence. The tulips explode

silently into bloom, red, orange, yellow. Her granddaughter falls in love for the first time in silence. And just now a storm

of blue jays explodes over the crest of the house and drops down into the backyard and swarms silently upon the feeder,

the limbs, the lawn, and the dog in his pen is flinging himself silently into the air in a delirium, and yes,

finally it is certain that the season has turned, we have survived another bleak winter in silence.