The Forsythia is in Full Bloom as My Mom Pulls Away
in her Sunshine Yellow Beetle
with Cancer Again

The phone call comes at nine am. 
“Is it okay if I come by for a minute?” she asks. 
I know. 

I wait on our stone steps outside, 
howling shrieks of hide and seek
one window away. 

She pulls into our gravel driveway. 
Pebbles crunch beneath her tires
the way they always do. 
It is June. There are no clouds. 
Sunlight strikes me slant in the eyes. 
She gets out. I stand. 

“It’s back,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. 

I descend the one remaining flight of stairs. 
We climb back up them together, 
sit beside one another. 
I wrap my arms around her, 
fingers clinging to her buttery cotton cables. 
She rests her head on my freckled shoulder. 
We weep quietly. Knowingly, 
knowing nothing.

We talk little of facts. 
They will consume us later. 
Now, hide and seek has simmered
into race cars silently zooming up picture-story windows,
gravity, a limiting word in the hands of such adventurous gods.
Even the lawnmowers have stopped
choking down grass. 

There is the white noise of breathing.

And then she goes, 
backs down the long driveway, 
her little yellow beetle car
blending into the long line of yellow forsythia, 
sunlight swallowing her.