Waiting for the hospice nurse to call back.

Waiting to see if Mom can sleep more than 40 minutes.
Waiting to see if the cramps ease up, the ones that feel
like labor pains, she says, though she hasn’t labored
for 64 years. Waiting to see if she vomits again.
Waiting as she empties, as she fills, as she empties,
as she unwinds this lifetime, as she comes apart.

Waiting for the hospice nurse to call back
in the house where our RN mom raised us.
I don’t remember the last dawn I saw here,
perhaps during college when I rose early
to make the commute to the big school
45 minutes away?

This second December dawn comes cold—
45 degrees on the thermometer outside
the kitchen window, where I stand at the sink
and watch the first car of the day curve up the hill
into the state park across the road,

where she and he used to drive the old Chevy
with boat trundling behind, two girls in tow,
bound for the lake that drew them here,
each taking turns steering us all across liquid
cobalt, our quartet skiing one at a time
into a summer’s evening.

I see us through the hazy almond veil of long ago,
a breezeless stillness, sandhill cranes chortling
to each other overhead, in the chill of waiting
for the hospice nurse to call. To make
a home visit. To bring something, please,
anything to help, to make it stop.