Three for my Margaret Gran
The longer months--she'd left to live--they'd said.
My Dad thought that meant; more than a year.
Cowardly sensitive, I agreed only by ommission.
And tried not to act surprised, the longer she was.

----------

It was funny, our living goodbye--
how neither of us said anything--not even
how sad we would be, how distant I was going
overseas--we spoke of our abandoned, criminal lives.
And instead I wrote her a card
of my inability to speak.

She choked on blood, my Mother said--breaking
into how we spoke of her
into her speech, her insistance--and I had wished
for her a final articulate goodbye.
And it is funny--even uncanny--how
that gutteral glob
between the two of us,
and in the ocean, said.

----------

I saw my Gran the day I left,
and it was as if it were a great contraction of all my life;
all from adult now, to having told her childhood dreams.
We'd reminiced on jewel-heists that never were.

We spoke then, and in a roundabout way,
said everything except our actual goodbyes.
But I remember the way she held my hand at the car,
wishing me good travel, her fingers in mine.

They way we'd talked,
was to draw everything but the absence out.
But that touch was irrefutable. It had been done.
I'll miss our rambling talks -- and in my thoughts:

Not goodbye, but good journey. I love you.