At My Mother's Deathbed

The leaves of the plum tree outside the window are

Liquid-like blood spatters when the sun plays

Behind them.

I can’t remember about photosynthesis, how it works

When the leaves aren’t green.

The pillowcase under her head is a stiff, bleached field of white

Sprayed with tiny pink flowers,

Not the one from yesterday, which was, as I recall,

Blue with yellow stripes.

Memory: she took me out of school—fourth grade?  fifth?—and

We rode an AC Transit bus to the city to buy clothes at

J. Magnin, and she told me

Red wasn’t my color.

Sitting on the window sill are

Two mismatched plastic water glasses—

One a quarter full of Ensure, the other of water—

Each with a maroon-handled metal spoon

Leaning against its rim.

On the dresser, a photograph of her and my one-year-old son, who wore

A blue shirt and red Oshkosh overalls,

Very much the fashion in 1986.

Her moaning is terrible until

I ask Kathleen to give her the morphine

Half an hour early.

Her watch, which she keeps checking, is

Large-faced, with a stretchy red band.

“Twenty-five dollars at CVS,” she often told me,

Even when she could no longer remember

My son’s name.

Another memory: she taught me to play mahjong

When I was nine, then waited for me to come home

So we could set up tiles on the table in front of

French doors that opened onto the fern garden. 

Winds, dragons, flowers.

Bam, crack, dot.

“Real players play it faster,” she

Liked to let me know.

She was born when Woodrow Wilson was president.

Her fingers look just like mine.

The moaning is terrible.  She is pulling at the sheet.

“We’ll call the nurse,” Kathleen says.

The painting on the wall is one she

Painted of our house in 1964.

In it, the green leaves of trees—

Whose conversion of light into chemical energy I

Understand—shimmer.

Through the window of my father’s study,

Pens and pencils bloom

In a squat, red pot.

She took a class through Adult Ed.  One class.

The red doesn’t mean anything.  It is just

What was,

The truth around us on

Those days. 

I thought writing it down would

Safeguard the details of grief,

The minutia of loss,

Would remind me how I felt, watching

The empty gaze,

The caving-in of skin over bone,

The arms vainly flailing,

The rattle-y slowing-down.

But it is already fading, all that.

And what I mainly remember is hopefully modeling the plaid dress 

In the tiny, mirrored room, 

And then my heart shriveling in my chest as she told me, authoritatively, that

I should try on something blue instead.