From across the street, we must have seemed

a pretty picture, mother and daughter in lawn chairs,

that summer of waiting,

my mother watching the day, Sunday or Saturday,

all days had merged into blunt phrases of light ending in dark,

the name no longer mattered.

 

That day, she wore the bright pink dress, full and flowing,

that my brother had bought her,

and a patchwork scarf of vital colors

obscured what remained of her hair;

there was little else we could give her;

her desires had become so difficult

to discern.

 

The bearded man with wire-rimmed glasses

asked to photograph us.

“I’ll send you prints,” he offered.

This seemed to please my mother

who couldn’t say so,

since the cancer had paralyzed her speech.

She nodded in affirmation

at the large old-fashioned camera,

boxlike, an indifferent hole at its center.

He smiled as he steadied its perch on the tripod.

We watched as we waited in silence.

 

Years before, when we shared a bedroom,

each morning my mother would smoke her first cigarette

before leaving bed.

Silent, she watched me as I dressed, as I brushed my hair,

squinting her eyes, she followed my every movement,

with her every inhalation.

I hated it.

Later, I realized, she was only smoking,

and I was the only moving object in the room.

 

By the time her speech

had begun to slur, the cancer had grown, from the lung,

too adamant to ignore.

Suddenly, every day was stripped to the minimum,

living became little rituals with no space

for grace or charm,

laughter, a brief escape from the shuddering boredom.

 

Now, she wanted this picture.

Each click of the camera extracted

another inch of pain

exposed her slow disintegration,

her dying interrupted.

 

We never saw that man again,

or his picture of two figures

on a doorstep on a street in a city,

where one was dying,

though the picture would never know that.

by Linda Pizzi

This poem was first published in the Paterson Literary Review