The Going.(Poem)

 
Bowl 
 
   The Tao of forgetting 
   is just pure emptiness held in trust 
   but lifting a little transparency from blue 
   to farewell sadness. 
   Forgetting even forgetting. 
   Did I honour her enough 
   casting off the cliff edge of each moment 
   or ditched on the nowhere shore 
   with scrambled coordinates and fading maps 
   my mother, going somehow on? 
   Her after-image seems a space 
   where nothing is and yet may be: 
   the shape of welcome in her favourite bowl 
   the taupe of deep old water 
   round the sides and lapping over the rim 
   like running your mind along a secret 
   tropic and tasting dusk. 
   Inside, a scoop of glossy azure pools to 
   midnight blue with scattered flecks of gold 
   a galaxy, a future in the past. 
   The glaze that makes a mirror of this sky 
   is crazed with hairline cracks--the precipitate 
   birth of an archipelago 
   its shimmer of tiny islands losing touch 
   like thought marooned from thought 
   a thousand times a day 
   and listening into the silence for itself ... 
   Near-death she'd met when young as golden light 
   beyond the ...