Sub-Irene

I never know the year.

Months, maybe. And a numbered day.

But yes, I’m doing better now,

more than when she was still here.

The metal’s cold

and distant hum,

dulcimer, a sonar sense of her

 drifts through to air to me now here

with my lungs

and birds and passing cars,

and that Fourth Dimension vortex sound

though no plane is seen so high.  

Can you hear the song?

A frequency in swim - 

a feeling for – I can’t be wrong,  

that long-off moan of mom.

Oh I know, such a loaded word.

but it’s there, and ghosts

they are not some tasseled bookmarks

slicing decks of Great Big History,

nor just appear in cameras green.

What I mean to say is this…

it is not silent when they go.

Not within the noggin, that’s just family,

but I still hear, just off out there,

as if on some Deific digital delay…

mere further than the rooster is away --

An endless pause,

like she’s stuck on maybe just one word

of her oh so many, many … many …

to which I daily concatenate absurd. 

I know her Spirit.

I am her smile!

Giggle, sure is Mom to me.

But these darkened days –

a centered womb calls to me once more

seems to pull from deep entombed

lonely longing beneath the sea,

and nary a Titanic Cameron

to try to feed strange fish

and try to bring the wreckage up.

I think of her often,

and that is not enough now within this submarine.

There’s a wrong-way Eden up ahead,

a not feeling ever really free.

Any moment now, could be over any hill.

A hum resumes amid the plumes

of color and of Will,

only slightly less marked down

than the one we always get for Free.