Robert A. Fink

Mother’s Day

Tornado humid
and still as an elderly couple
in a car about to spin the highway:
an oak tree comes into focus,
an anonymous field of white-faced cows.

Outside my window, new pecan leaves
droop green as if the scene were underwater
or a lost world cut off from explanation.
A cardinal flashes past, complicates the scheme.
Memory is a fickle teacher

never satisfied with any one position,
so I turn seven and snug between a V
of sycamore limbs swaying green
between the sky, one fist of blue above my head,
and the ground thirty feet below

where my mother waits
holding her apron like a net
making promises we both know
she cannot keep.