To My Mother in Surgery

You’re under anesthesia’s spell,

and I’m in the Appalachians.

Won’t let my movie-mind play

what’s happening,

can’t second guess

the Plan for an 85-year-old,

so I’ll think of us last week—

shopping, lunching, sampling key lime pie.

In your Florida garden, I recited my new poems,

you clapped, believing in me as always.

My brother just called: You made it through.

I know what you look like in ICU, so tiny

in a trap of wires and tubes,

hardly my mother at all.

I’ll change the film to us on the beach:

You grasp my arm, lean into me.

We watch sanderlings sprint

from white-hot sands

to the brink

of receding

seas.