Sonnet For My Mother

Your little bronzed shoe stands on my long low table,
the table that reminds me of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, 
between the fossil I use as a coaster and the statue of Buddha.
Nearly every morning, as I light the day's first Camel,
I'm surprised again -- is it really possible
that the same person wore that shoe and became my mother,
and that your own mother and father,
who dipped your shoe in liquid metal
to remember you by while you grew,
have themselves gone quietly, terribly away,
leaving us to choose which ova to slough off and which to raise, 
charging us to try and fill these strange bodies?

That's how it is for me to wake each day,
to enter once again this life you gave.