“My mother left . . .”

My mother left, not with another man, and not all at once, but little by little, pieces of her falling away.  She didn't pack suitcases, she didn't make arrangements, she didn't bring back a present.

She slid out of reach, over that place where the earth curves, where our ancestors believed it ended.  They needed to be careful. 

Now we know better: The horizon is continuous, the earth is round. 

“We” perhaps, but not I.  She fell off this edge.  It is out there, I know.      

Things went blank, whole continents froze up and covered over and disappeared.  Where were the footprints, the markers?

The landscape was laid waste, the maps redrawn.

I no longer knew where we had started, what it had been like to have her.  A spirit fled, like ghosts, like gods no longer believed in. . . .

I dig, trying to discover what I had, what I lost.  I listen for the music that must be somewhere, like the light of stars so far away we see their deaths a million years later.

I splice together fragments like the crumbled pieces of an ancient scroll, put back together by scholars believing: This is where we must have come the from.