Moonset in the southwestern sky,
Venus and Saturn suspended above
a tiny fingernail of waxing crescent,
as I pull into the driveway in
her car with her in the front seat.

Never mind that she’s been gone
for 12 days, that she lifted off from
the family room on the winter solstice
with “The Music Man” on TV,
shortly after Marian the librarian
was sweetly serenaded by a
pitch-perfect barbershop quartet.

If hearing is, indeed, the last of
the senses to go, then let her be
surrounded, my sister and I figured,
by some ringing chords on her way
to the great chorus in the sky.

And if she’s still within shoutin’
distance now, before I get out of
the car, I put my hand on the small
box that contains what remains of her
and say, “We’re home, Ma.”

This is how I know she’s gone:
the singing silence. Something
she was not known for.

I bring her inside—“Here you go,
Ma,” I say—setting her gently on
the dining room table with her
official papers in her tasteful bag
from the mortuary.

I walk into the hall and open
the closet door where, for
two decades, Dad’s been tucked
away in his matching box.

“She’s back,” I tell him,
hoping that, for all their tussles
in life, they’ve met up again
as points of light zinging
around the universe,

attracted to each other like
protons and electrons
orbiting a nucleus that might
just be the two daughters
they made together,

the giantness in our smallness
of this little atom we call family.

•••

(With thanks and love to Kathleen Lynch.)