To His Mother, Whose Name Was Maria

Invoked every sundown, it’s you, painted on clouds rouging our treasured plain and all who walk it, with leaf-fresh kids and women damp from traveling, city-bound, in the radiance of a just-stopped shower; it’s you, mother eternally young, courtesy of death’s plucking hand, rose at the fragrant point of unpetaling, you who are the alpha of every neurosis, every torturing anxiety, and for this I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.