The Red Portrait

Last night she came to me, my mother, dead: but as she was in the photo, that last Christmas, wearing a red dress, and her lipstick was red (I wonder if that means she lives in hell), and I saw again that she was beautiful, the same high forehead I have, the same wide brow, and just my age, forty-nine; and now I was talking fast, because I knew I had no time, and I told her I loved her, I told her how her life had informed mine, and I begged her to come to me again, to meet my children, my wife. I said to her—My work, see what I have made, I have tried to do what you did not live to do. But she smiled at me and began to fade.