And Soul

My mother died one summer— 

the wettest in the records of the state. 

Crops rotted in the west. 

Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. 

Empty deck chairs collected rain. 

As I took my way to her 

through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly 

behind houses 

and on curbsides, to pay her 

the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something 

I remembered 

I heard once, that the body is, or is 

said to be, almost all 

water and as I turned southward, that ours is 

a city of it, 

one in which 

every single day the elements begin 

a journey towards each other that will never, 

given our weather, 

fail— 

       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, 

cloud color reaching into air, 

the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, 

salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, 

as if that wasn't enough, all of it 

ending up almost every evening 

inside our speech— 

coast canal ocean river stream and now 

mother and I drove on and although 

the mind is unreliable in grief, at 

the next cloudburst it almost seemed 

they could be shades of each other, 

the way the body is 

of every one of them and now 

they were on the move again—fog into mist, 

mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze 

that lay on the railings of 

the house she was dying in 

as I went inside.

-Evaan Boland,