Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Nocturnal

6 Nocturnal When I can’t sleep, she lets me sit next to her in the lamplight and read. She is drinking wine from a glass that opens like a flower. It shines in a room that has laid down shadows over the television, the stereo, the way you put a bird to sleep. Soon even my mother will sleep, and I’ll stare at the shapes by myself. It looks like we’re moving, everything covered for the truck. I should roll up the rug with the circles of braid that sit in the arches of our feet. And we’ll take the red curtains and my brother and the boxes of sleep in the closet because we’ll want to remember what it felt like to live here 7 for the last three winters of Richard’s life and this one when we stayed up together, the clock in the hallway still ticking, and every hour that bird shooting out. ...