Living Trust

I am entrusted with their bodies
and their psyches, and today
I want to ask the neurologist
about medicinal marijuana,
to take the edge off. For them,
not for me, but that might be
a good idea, too. My mother
gets sick at the thought of going out.
She climbs into bed and when
the danger has passed, the event
missed, she gets up for dinner.
It’s good that she eats! But a long
day in bed without water is bad.

Twice now, I have read
“the disciple whom he loved”
and this must have been Mary
Magdalene, the beloved, even
if the writers got the pronouns wrong,
and this is all in translation, anyway.
She sat with him at dinner, and she
was present at the crucifixion,
and she has a gospel of her own.

I have been writing toward and around
the difficult subject, over and over again.
At work, the music I heard in childhood
plays in my head, and I am weeping
for all the losses. I am behind plexiglass,
transparent. I am handling book tape
and cardstock and plastic. A voice
comes through the library announcing
Baby Rock in the Community Room.
I could go down and stand in the doorway!

Pontius Pilate kept trying to give Jesus
back to his people, and they didn’t want him.
Everyone was afraid. Fear is a guarantee.
My mother has broken her nose in a fall,
her ribs, her pelvis. She keeps healing.
She is in a safer place now, but my father
is a bad caretaker. He tells her to take
her pills but he doesn’t stay and watch
her take them. When she stays in bed
all day, sometimes he makes her get up
at night to be with him. We have signed
all the papers for a living trust. When he
dies, only the legal transition will be easy.

No, probably not. Pilate went back and forth
to the people outside from the chamber
within. There is blood on all our doorposts.
The story is never over.

— Kathleen