Getting Along
The white antique porcelain bowl
your mother gave us
has blue veins that wander over its surface.
Holding it up to the light I also see
there are fine cracks here and there.
Age has made it more interesting,
more worth keeping,
still good to look upon.
The veins resemble deltas and tributaries,
the fine cracks look like the lines
on the palms of my hands,
some lead somewhere, others
just dead end,
but all the veins join and mingle.
The varicosity is getting worse,
her ankles are swelling despite the water tablets.
We will keep washing, drying, and looking.
The bowl, like a luminous north star,
is set upon a side table;
a leg of the table needs fixing;
she does not ask me to fix much anymore,
she knows my hands are broken plates.
Her mother was 85 when she died;
the bowl is older yet somehow stronger
as if it had survived the entropy of
many unforeseeable times.
While she is showing me her swollen ankles,
the phone rings. It’s the Doctor,
he wants to know if I am still hallucinating.
I tell him I don’t think so,
it’s just that some things seem like other things;
there are connections, a fine network of nexus’s
that I had not noticed before,
however,
we are both getting along well
despite the translucency of these days.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2023
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