I am his passenger in the turning light, my boyfriend of years, not yet married, going to see his mother. Through the windshield of our car circling in tulips bending, fanning around: Lanes, and Drives and Courts, down onto the Circle where his mother has moved (co-op condo, gated). Here is where she will live on after his father, into the disappearing of clear, distinct seasons. 

She has the stove, the island kitchen, the retirement lawn Daddy never saw. The time has come when turkeys should be gathering outside over this lawn’s newness: tires turning, fields made, grasses planted to grow until the small sickles of lawnmower blades. Crescent shines rotating, green behind: Hickory, Cherry, other locating designations. 

In the new space the good son has built for her, the perennial sounds of voices televised, Daddy no longer near, not staring at the phone in his hand, the image of an old vacation, fluttering flags, not real flags, where the confusion converged into terror. Remember when the bad son, the other son, took him there a last time and put him on a ride, down a drop into the dark, around a corner. 

Whether a character carried gun or ax made him hunter or woodcutter. Snow White’s dark ride among black waters, her adventures, where is she, Doc, where is he? 

Now, I move to her glass doors, framing the back expanse, turkeys, turkey vultures, roused tongues. Sitting down at the table I open back up a play—It certainly is a lot of work clearing all that Being and cutting to the chase1—talking quietly to me while he faded away. I had not been old enough to save my own mother so there was Calvin, floating shell of his waterproof fiberglass boat, removing her to Rainbow Avenue after we children left home. 

“People have to have jobs, Douglas,” my mother would say on the phone call when I mentioned the reopening of coal mines, as a way to try to address it being too early for her daffodils to be blooming, she says without wanting to consider any of the attached policies, another holiday. Six children for her from my sister is enough, children my sister dresses up in shades of tulip blooms, Easter jewels, while round and round they will go in cultivated whirls they will learn, complimenting colors.

1 Snow White, Elfriede Jelinek, trns. Gitta Honegger.