The 90th Year

High in the jacaranda shines the gilded thread of a small bird's curlicue of song-too high for her to see or hear. I've learned not to say, these last years, ‘O, look!-O, listen, Mother!' as I used to. (It was she who taught me to look; to name the flowers when I was still close to the ground, my face level with theirs; or to watch the sublime metamorphoses unfold and unfold over the walled back gardens of our street… It had not been given her to know the flesh as good in itself, as the flesh of a fruit is good. To her the human body has been a husk, a shell in which souls were prisoned. Yet, from within it, with how much gazing her life has paid tribute to the world's body! How tears of pleasure would choke her, when a perfect voice, deep or high, clove to its note unfaltering! She has swept the crackling seedpods, the litter of mauve blossoms, off the cement path, tipped them into the rubbish bucket. She's made her bed, washed up the breakfast dishes, wiped the hotplate. I've taken the butter and milkjug back to the fridge next door-but it's not my place, visiting here, to usurp the tasks that weave the day's pattern. Now she is leaning forward in her chair, by the lamp lit in the daylight, rereading War and Peace. When I look up from her wellworn copy of The Divine Milieu, which she wants me to read, I see her hand loose on the black stem of the magnifying glass, she is dozing. ‘I am so tired,' she has written me, ‘of appreciating the gift of life.'