Daughter, Can You Hear Me, What I Say?

At fifty, when I talk to my twelve-year-old son,
we talk about air guns, basketball, rock music,
once in a while grades, if I'm lucky. Girls....

When I speak with my husband, it's books, meetings,
what's for dinner, how tired he is. Tomorrow.
Christmas vacation. What all our son means to say.

When my husband talks to his mother, he hardly
talks about anything except relatives, who's sick
or who died. Sometimes recipes. Not my politics,

not things of my soul. And when he talks to his
Dad, it's always football or baseball--who passed
and made it or missed. What the score might have

been. What comes on soon and then wonder what time
and when. Daytimes, I never talk to my father, who
silenced it all thirty years ago, dying too soonŠ.

And when I call my mother, it's about triglycerides,
church, sometimes scripture or prayer. Or her
neighbors, the flowers, freezes, cold air. Yesterday

she had been to her doctor and driven back by herself
forty miles. What we talked about was something
urgent, something she desperately wanted to tell

me, something she had not anyone else, not even her
husband, to tell. It was the sunset, she said, and
the white cloud she had seen--how huge it was, and

how strange. How she watched it for thirty-some
miles. Saw all the shapes it took, all the pink glow
it became. How she had never seen anything like it

until now. How she had thought of little else since.
How she had dreamed of it, how she thanked God.
How she had wanted me to see, exactly, that scene.

-Adobe Anthology