Chill

I couldn’t take my eyes off her face

in the bed, that silent pre-death repose.

She looks more floral than human, 

her face white as the chill before the bloom,

the skin folding scion-like around her skull, 

protecting the still living root below.

Beside her in a hard chair I watch for hours, 

day after day, my own self now shrinking 

from my dread, from my shock that this force 

(my mother was a lion) can be so undone--

the same dazed astonishment when I saw the scaffold

of a great doomed whale belly up on the sand

of Santa Cruz--a skyscraper of white bones, 

picked clean by who knows what and yet 

still mighty in grace and history.