Self Portrait at Sunrise

For a long time
I’ve wanted to write
a poem describing
those last few days
my mother spent alive
in some small place
that I could only get to
behind the black holes
in her eyes,
beyond the usual
metaphors for dying.
Instead, I’m sitting
in the Hilltop Tavern,
eating lunch, notebook open
and stained with gravy,
staring down a pile
of scooped and mashed potatoes
with a single word
on my mind – Amber.
No matter how many ways
I pull, stretch, bend, and twist
this word, I can’t make it fit
into a sentence with death.
Amber is the color
of the cold beer the waitress
places on my table, the kind
mom said I drank
too often before cocktail hour.
Butterscotch candy tasted amber
when I was four years old
and choking on it. She
snatched me from the kitchen
floor, held me by my legs,
and slapped my back hard,
returning the life she had
already given. The tiger lilies
in the last of her small garden,
most beautiful right before they die,
smell amber after the sun
has opened and fed them
the amber source of that death,
like the tiny mosquito trapped,
a small black spot with legs
and blood and wings, frozen for eons
in prehistoric tree sap called amber.