My mother's face is turning into stone.

The old bones are bleak, sharp sarcophagi,
   silhouettes of former handsome woman,
   auburn-topped
   clinging now to egotism
   chiseled in maternal rock
   —vicious against the godless infirmities
   of eighty-four year-old abundant life.

The TV-forgotten starlet cries.
Who cares?

I love her old yellow teeth, worn smooth
   like a calf's
   her flat-insistent grandmotherliness
   distilled in goat-humped plentitude
   and sudden oatmeal health.

Let night press translucent lips
   across her perfect cheeks;
my efforts are as impotent
   as the winter sun's assault
   on coastal vaults of fog;
and love, like lotto-dreams, is all
   to nought—old stubs tossed
   from a speeding car.

There, in the basket, the frightened kitten peeks,
   eyes permanently racing home
   to perfect chasing death.

In bed, the corpse lies too small,
   like country-Jesus remorsefully drawn
   upon a Lutheran cross,
   breaths taken in advance of sea's demise,
   with writhing universality,
   wanton carnal salt.

The six-pound cat
lay flat on the chilly boards,

its eyes moving in circles,
its whiskers twitching,
and its gills raising gaping holes in its sides.

"They'll live a long time if you'll just
pour water over them."

Its eyes made weird circles
under the raw wind off the Neches River.
Its gills made gaping red holes in its sides.

I took a deep breath and left.
And then the shameful sweet rain fell.