for Mom, Bruce and Christopher

If I looked up I could
have seen the vulture
with his eye on those I loved.

Its dark beak piercing
the blue sky,
circling my mother for

eleven months while we
helped her walk, helped her
eat, helped her breathe.

Circling my uncle, the one who’d
been straddling this side of death for
twenty-plus years, so sudden a death

on Thanksgiving morning, three weeks
after my mother, so sudden because
he’d survived despite the odds of HIV

and the cause of death? Unknown.
Enough, I breathed into the wind,
my wet pillows, the air that pressed

into me as I walked out into the winter day.
And if I would have looked up
I would have seen it circling one more time;

he’s 34, I say now, why him?
Circling around my comforter and friend,
a sad, young man with a body that needed

more help than we could have given.
I still don’t look up. I don’t
want to know. I hear

the flapping of wings like the
turning of pages that I
just don’t want to read.

01/26/2007

Posted on 01/26/2007
Copyright © 2024 Lisa Marie Brodsky