A hundred sixty years of lucid memory sit
under a plump umbrella on the patio-
two widows nursing whiskey sours argue politics:
my grandmothers. When they turned 80 we began
to mark their changes as we might a child’s
in terms of sight, mobility and appetite,
teeth and toilet habits, clarity of speech
a thousand calibers of round flight
by which my children make their distance now from me.
Sometimes I think of them as parts of me …
I think their ageless quarrels come to roost
like odd birds with an awkward plumage in my blood.
The one says tend your own twigs, peep & preen.
The other wings beyond the kindly orbit here
and sings, and sings, and sings.
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