A poem I found today

I Dreamed I Took My Mom to Lunch

Taking my mom to lunch with Mary and Greg
to some Miami Beach looking hotel where the menu
is on the window without prices.

Mom and I sit down at a café table to wait while
Greg goes to see how much it costs to eat there,
They bring salad and by the time Greg comes back
to tell us it is too expensive, too late because we
had eaten our salads and there the confusion began

We have to eat, my mom has to eat I tell Greg and
and Mary disappears from the dream momentarily
somehow so do I, in an instant but I return

I think we are to eat and I sit down, then look down
at the soup and reach for my spoon, take a bite, look
up at an elderly stranger and I guess his wife with
milky faces like the soup I cannot un-eat.

More confusion as I get up and my mom is up and her
wheelchair is not her wheelchair and I hold her up
and tell Greg to get the wheelchair and he sits in
it and a waiting lunch customer pushes him up
the ramp leading to the gardens above the fountain

This is not funny and bring back the wheelchair
and a group of waiters, would be lunchers, not staff,
laugh and beg to differ on the humor of my fear

and amazement. They bring her back to me and
I say let’s go and this is not her wheelchair and we
are rolling along and my mom leans all the way
over to pick up something silver that is just a piece
of carpet tape. I’m afraid she will spill forward.
And what happened to her chair and Greg tells me,
“When I quit smoking I had these rubber boots I always
used to wear and they told me to change boots and
that would help me quit smoking,” and I said what does
that, never mind, get the chair, meet us

so we are headed to the parking area, unsure of where
and we stop above the big fountains, looking down
from a steep drop, a waterfall, two-hundred-feet down
and I see Mary walking briskly toward us then a sister
then I look as my mother wanders over to the edge
begins looking over, wheels slightly rolling, grab
her just as the front wheels are on the downside of
the edge, just enough for one hand strong, the other
weak, the chair turns, her body coming toward the edge
the chair at an angle I think just enough to spill her,
flash thought: She wants to die. I wake up.

I think she wanted to die, or I, did I

Tom Todaro
8 April 2002