- i could hear her old car, my mother
- crawling up the long driveway between cornfields
- a tenth of a mile the wheels grinding
- to a stop. a door shuts. heels clicking on the cracked blacktop
- i tried
- not to look at her face as she
- rounded the corner i
- sat transfixed eyes glued to the television
- commercials interjecting the tired wrinkled
- hand i could feel resting on my shoulder
- she was coming home, alone, without him
- and i did not want to participate in her sorrow.
- i could feel her breath,
- staggering like a racehorse
- trying to draw me into the scene the stone
- courthouse where he was tried
- the two-year sentence
- the bailiff escorting him from her fingernails
- her clenching fingernails
- now holding his wallet, his tie, his watch
-
- the watch that sits locked away
- in a cabinet in my mother’s room
- its hands more still than my mother’s hands
- resting on my shoulder that day
-
- as a constant reminder
- that time stood still.