Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by Beckett.           

           You know that sense of sinking through crust,

                        the low black oh no of the little room

	                    with walls too close, so knowable.

Clink and slow fade of toys that belong in memory

            but wrongly appear here, vagrant and suffocated

	           on a page of pain.

		        Worse

	           she says when I ask.

           And as in Beckett some high humour grazes

her eye -

	  “we went out rowing on Lake Como”-
		
	          not quite reaching the lip.

	                    Our love, that halfmad firebrand,

	          races once around the room 
	
            whipping everything

and hides again.