beginning with I don’t know what
I don’t know how far back to get to the lost
beginnings of loss   as lost as his memory
of the morning’s breakfast   lost as yesterday 

or the day before that or the last day
the landscape outside his hospital window
was in flower   in leaf    

the beginnings of his last breath   last exhalation
lodged in the room itself   I don’t know how
many times   how many times he asked
my mother to take him home   but this is your home   

how many times before pushing her way out
of the ward   to the lobby to the parking lot   to her car
to her single woman’s apartment to cry out her loss 

that was when he had a voice   when he could still
make sense   make sentences taking place
in the slipping away past tense and in the end
it all became present   the past even 20 minutes past 

20 minutes didn’t last and it was today
and today and today and that was a kind of hell
we thought all of it was hell and it was

hell and all were lost   those stumbling
souls closing the circular march round
and round the restless clock of their days
and months and it was hell but it held

angels in the worst of that present continuous
angels to wake them and walk them   a landscape
of angels to spoon up the spilled and the lost