Home again, her gray-white hair

1:52 a.m. A series of familiar domestic scenes composed as life-sized photographs, each of which can be opened like doors with a flapping, clacking, wooden-plastic sound. Behind the last, my mother is sitting upright on a plain brown couch from my childhood, her head against the wall and face older than ever, with deep-set wrinkles the grooves of which extend upward into her gray-white hair. She is smiling, and even though I know she’s alive, I’m so surprised and overjoyed by it that I cry out oh oh oh in a voice that wakes me up, and then continues, as it slowly ebbs into a moan.


Update:
In the Forum: this volume is affectionately inscribed.