Mother

Mother

She wondered how I did it, just walked up

and began playing basketball with a clutch

 

of kids in a strange city five hundred miles

from home on a station wagon vacation.

 

What my mother missed: my arms raised,

palms up and fingers spread, language

 

common to all courts: throw me the ball.

Somebody did. I took a shot. The game began.

 

Back on the road, she turned from the front seat

and looked at me. How scary that must have been,

 

her youngest child spurning shyness, opening up.

I thought about her today, the last of October,

 

her birthday. How she silently endured three sons.

Cards with witches: beneath the Happy

 

we’d X-out Halloween and scrawl Birthday.

Years later, an old man in Paris, I jog

 

onto a court in a park and open my arms.

A boy passes me the ball. I still love the feel

 

of pebbled leather. I loved my mother, too,

though she never opened her arms to me,

 

nor I to her.

What are you looking for?