The Tomato-coloured Couch 4:20pm
My Mother’s Day Bunch
is a scraggly cascade of drying
lilly petals & crisp carnations
There are three well-preserved roses
the colour of autumn
with a card held high
“Hope You’ll enjoy
The Light of My Life bouquet –“
The Hawk Deck 9:36am
I Am The Vessel
of Life
consuming inordinate quantities
of water
retaining fluid
in My Head
& Limbs
I hear the call of The Mourning Dove
& The Grackle
on This New Spring Morning
I think of what My Life
contains:
My House
My Husband
My Far-away Kids
grown now
with Their Own
Lives
The Tomato-coloured Couch 6:35pm
I have come a long way
since My Son
was born
27 years ago
& I have decided to make
My New Year’s Resolution
early:
NO MORE SIGNIFICANCE
TO SEQUENTIAL 2’s —
if I could stop drinking I can
stop anything —
and I WILL stop The World
when It’s Time
The Hawk Deck 7:47pm
All That I Have Lived For
Is Wrapped Up In This Moment
As I Am Wrapped In My Heavy Grey Bathrobe
With The Spears Of Light Forever Above Me
And All Down Around Me
How Have I Gotten This Far?
Through A Child’s Adoration Of A Pair
Of Love Birds To A Mother’s Love
Of Her Dearest 2.4’s
The Evening Light Is Upon The East
Illuminating The Scrub Spruce Forest
And I Have Come This Far
November 6, The Hawk West Desk Window 9:35pm
I saw The Pain
of His Parents’ Separation
flash across His Teenage Face:
six years later
when to My Son I felt I could confess
a poisonous love I husbanded
too long
am husbanding still — now My Daughter
runs Her Mother’s Risk
of another broken home
the one Eliza’s been homesick for
all Her Life
The Hawk Kitchen 4:30pm
Born Twenty-five Years Ago
in a rinky-dink hospital
in a fishing town
My Sweet Child is a grown man
& I Love Him So
out with His Camera
in a Montreal Blizzard
Joanna Gilman Hyde 