Twenty years later, she's just fine.

To A Mother

Driving by the park on the eve of

Thanksgiving after Italian food

we were an intercourse roar, laughing

through the streets, nowhere in particular

Together, we watched a huddled walker

across the far birth of wet grass

overgrown, desolate, familiar

she in her coat, hunched in her lone walk

Then the recognition—I steer us over

Alongside her.  She is red in the eyes

a stranger crying; yet her voice, her face

steeped in fog.  And her embarrassed tears

They had argued, she said.  It was “not a good idea

to go by,” and so she walked and we drove on

“Goodnight,” is for a long time to your mother

going on and on in the cold.