Vespers
When she left her body
she disappeared to a lake
the color of glaciers,
slipped through the lip of water,
swam inside a tabernacle.
All that was chronic disappeared:
desire, cancer, ache, hunger.
I searched the globes of her fixed pupils
and thought: witness, birth of a child,
death of a mother, closed her eyelids,
stepped away from the breeze.
Mary Morris
The Massachusetts Review Spring 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Mary Morris
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission