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.