Better the Cup Breaks Before You

“There is so much that I saved for special—how stupid. Upstairs in my closet are clothes I’ve never worn, because I was saving them for something special. Now I’m dying, and I’ll never wear those clothes. Now I know—it’s all special. When you go home tonight, pull out one of the china plates I gave you that you are saving for special, and eat a taco off of it. Splash salsa, be messy, and use the cloth napkins.  Drink tea out of that antique cup. If it breaks, at least you enjoyed it first. Everything ends eventually, better the cup breaks before you.”
— Judith Pittman, quilter, fiber artist, creative problem-solver, 

    April 26, 1937 - June 8, 2003

After Chemotherapy

I can do nothing but watch

a sky ripe with stars, spilling a path of light

over her bed, a brilliance fading

until there is one faint star

slowly receding, the last point of light

as the night turns itself off,

a dim face, a tiny white bird drifting away

into a universe so edgeless

and vacant it might get lost.

The mountain opens its red mouth

and red clouds fly out and crows oddly quiet,

just the panting of their wings

against the still air. Scattered on her floor

are a few pale pink and deep rosy flowers—

no, just the crumpled tissues

into which she coughed.

Soaking her wash cloth in steamy water,

I gently bathe her back, each vertebra

pushing up like a buried pebble,

then her shoulders hunched from years

of fine needlework, then her hands,

slender, with their unblemished olive skin

rippling over veins, her ruddy palms,

her long, perfect fingers that remember

doing all of this for me, then her feet.

I hold and separate each toe to swab

the web of skin in between. For the first time,

I see my mother.

Was it Christ or the Buddha who said     

“make of yourself a light”? My mother

is a star, cooling. Each day her body,

with its heart of fire, consumes itself,

flinging out a little less light,

drawing us closer.

This poem is in memory of my mother who 
would be 74 today. It is the winner of the 
2011 Jodi Stutz Memorial Prize in Poetry 
and will be published in the May 2011 issue 

of Toyon: Humboldt State University's 

Journal of Literature and Art.