Standing straight, fully five feet tall, my mother's ghost
Recites the seventeenth of John Donne's
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
Which she'd memorized in tenth grade.
It's taken me thirteen years to realize that she
Might have enjoyed hearing poetry during the month
She spent dying in the hospital. But then,
How do I know that she did not? Once,
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne lay unconscious,
Thrashing and moaning, but in his mind
He was riding through woods, chatting pleasantly
With the ghost of his father. Perhaps the strong ghost
Of her own mother attended during those twilit days
Taking up her own name from the ground
And wearing it again to tell my mother
The many stories she'd have known well
And told herself, richly and suitably embroidered,
But for a tricksome grue of ice and an early death.
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