Una Visita Con Mama -- a Visit With Mama

We walk the rocky shore and you lean heavily on me, Mother, bruising my balky arm -- muttering "Ay, Hijo!". A few steps and, breathless, we are both exhausted. Your once-brown eyes, gone gray, are like concentric rings rippling from a random stone thrown into this polluted pond in winter. Cataracts cloud your lenses; they have a ruptured look -- purple, jellied -- like the eyes of a dead fish which I poke, perversely fascinated. It is puffed and rotten. Your eyes are puffed, too, red-rimmed, moist with tears that brim over though you try to blink them back. That you love me and I you, and that we wish to extend our time together, is clear. As clear as the fetid water in the pond, as clear as my conscience when I drop you at the Home, having invented a meeting, to which I must hastily fly.