The thin wire of her voice
shivers and fails, and between her words
she is a steady wishing, a sound
the white froth of water makes, tossed
back over a line of rocks,
a quiet insistence that keeps on going.
She says her feet hurt her
and she cannot hear me, two thousand
miles away, calling her from a place
she cannot imagine, lifting her from a sleep
that carries her each night
closer to something she fears beyond all else.
Today she has done mostly
the small few needful things that keep
her buoyant against the long waves
of silence swelling beneath her, moving her
with a dizzying and final intensity.
But what can I say to make it any easier?
She has become a strange fish,
lucid and small in the cool river of her body,
schooled here for so long she remembers,
without knowing, where the undercurrents
draw her, eddied for a moment now,
listening to a voice at the other end of her life.
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