in memory of Mary Rose McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or appear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while World War II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped—became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now—pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap—the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap off

in your grasp. But when Grandma's last breath
waltzed from that room, my heart opened

wide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die.
She simply found a silence she could call her own.