So. 
I've told my mother goodbye.
I have cradled her, saying it, in my arms—
lightly, though—she's been lying so delicately still, these days—
and anyway, she should sleep, it isn't dawn yet—
and at her insistence, I am on my way back to Virginia.
Three planes, four airports. Home in 25 hours.
At Dublin, not yet noon, I get the emails. 
She is worse again. The doctor says: days; a week. 
Ele says: she was waiting; she was waiting for you to go. 
The waiting rooms fill and empty; I wait; I rise; I go.
At Logan, at American midnight, my last flight 
before turning back sits idling on 
the tarmac out; idling and grumbling; 
until, at last, the whites of a runway swivel into view, 
and we are what's called taxiing. Which means inching ahead, 
as if through city traffic; still half-waiting, but with a gathering 
urgency—for our nose to scent the wide night sky—to ride 
this next horizon strip of lights—to, as if finally 
getting somewhere almost final, fly.
                        

The woman I love bids me kill a wasp.
She arms me with a snatched-up magazine.
 
In the valley of the shadow of my micro-hesitation
I admire its cover.
 
Yet neither (it having spooked her) will I prevaricate,
asking "What kind of wasp?"
(my love, I watched a pair last week, in our fig tree,
performing a pollination polka)—
 
nor will I whinge and wheedle: "But it's a poetry journal,
and I have a poem in it—it sings of you!"—
nor, not even in my head, my heart, 
shall I cavil should she answer:
 
The kind that is in our bathroom!
They sent three damn contributor copies!
 
Somewhere in the dusts, and the shadows,
and the tenderly unswept silences
 
of everything else we have left unsaid
over the course of forty-seven years 
to contrive and to keep torqued
the delicate, clanking gears of a marriage
 
there are real stairs I must mount
to where a real wasp,
mercifully already dying, 
trembles on its grout altar.