By Gail Mooney

I.

Against the night harbor

sea roses open, loose petalled

and trembling with scent.

My mother cups

a flower to my nose saying

They smell most beautiful as they die.

She points to a peeled birch

her hands freckled

like the camouflage of leaf and shade,

her palm smoothed across sun -dried lichen

recoiling as the yellow

billows into dust.

When she takes her hand

from my forehead, the feel of her fingers

is still there: one small ring

and the cool, roughened tips.

She waves from the beach

as I swim out further than intended…

out of fever, into sleep

drowning happily

as long as she keeps waving.

II.

What I was before you

was formless, an early fog

disguising the true chill

of secretly moving and inaudible waters.

But your hands were enough

to bring that chorus at sunset:

flocks of geese rising

into the expectant North

each migration loudly

throwing their compositions of memory and light

against the quiet moon

their calls suspended

by flesh and flight.

Now I listen

to the sad applause of the river

echoing against the dock

like small-fisted blows.

The night fills with wind,

its damp breath

the voice of your hands

traveling elsewhere

into transparency.

III.

One Last Thing for You Who Made Music

A quiet humming

begins on and off in your closed

but innocent hands.

There is nothing but pain

to conduct their forgiveness

and nothing to conduct it away.

The palms glow invisibly

their swelling a symphony

the pain like applauding too long.

A spasm of rhythm,

your final performance–

there the desire for greatness

cupped briefly, cupped tight.

Now your fingers are unfurling

like music, like light

holding nothing

but the sweet human gesture

of the open and hopeful hands.