Remembering my Mother, at Christmas

Except for this blog, I am not writing. I am reading, I am thinking, but I am not writing. If you were to ask me to write a poem I would say that I have no knowledge, at all, of poems—though of course I have written poems, some version of me has written poems, hundreds of them, journals full of them, but: How does one write a poem?

And if you were to ask me how a story gets made I'd ask you in return, What is a story? What does a story need? How do stories survive? I would ask, because it feels just now as if I don't know, as if I could never know, though some version of me has written dozens of stories, maybe hundreds, if you count tangents, drafts, revisions.

It is the holidays, and I am not writing; I am remembering. I am thinking about my mother at Christmas, all those Christmases (oh, how my mother loved Christmas) until her final Christmas, when she wasn't well and when it was my father and me every day for weeks in her ICU room. She was lost to us already, and yet I refused to believe, I held to the idea that she could hear me as I read aloud, that she could see the presents I brought for her—the handmade sweater, the ceramic tiles, the glamorous cooking ware, the roses (one for each of her children), the ornaments, the music and the machine that played the music.

Look, Mom, I would say. Mom, Look.

My mother loved Rod Stewart, and I am remembering that, and I am remembering how we filled her ICU room with his music, and how we waited for her to show us, somehow, that she could hear him. Hear us.

Sometimes I can remember, only. Poetry lives beyond me somewhere. Stories, too.