I saw our family’s matriarch this week.

Spent a night and afternoon bathed in her love.

Watched as she delivered candy heart grapes

and chocolate chip cookies to attendants

where her husband now resides –my uncle,

but no more like my uncle than I am 

to Hercules, so bent and gnarled is he,

a Joshua Tree inside the endless

pale expanse of his nursing home walls.

We signed the guest book where her name repeats

uninterrupted and boundless in the

otherwise bare pages, her Palmer-Method

perfect loops and whorls as precise as the

fingerprint of her love on him, on me,

on all blessed to call her kin and more than kind.