(Dis) Order

Confabulations, that's how my sister
described our mother's stories

How will the world end? Lonely,
the universe expanding past the visible stars

You need someone, probably a mother,
to create a narrative out of the past

On her shelf the Durants write
book after book to present an order

The last thing my mother could talk about
was teaching, that's what remained

Up and down, right and left, top and bottom
the quarks have found their order

Always the question, what's left?
We drilled her on family members

Who is to say we are more like chimps
than bonobos – make-up sex a gift

She remembered her parents,
the apartment above the shop

All those surplus theories of value,
my grandmother counting the day's cash

My mother worked on forgetting
my father ... twenty bad years

The work of memory, after the holocaust,
a cottage industry was created

Once she asked, How can these 
old ladies be my daughters?

And why is time unidirectional –
a good question even if Hawking was wrong

She begged me to take her home,
home to her father, to Olney, to Philadelphia

On schedule, the booklets from hospice
and she forgot us all, remembered music,

perhaps

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Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose poetry has been published in several chapbooks and in journals that include "About Place," “Cutthroat, “Unlikely Stories," “Rise Up Review,” ”Great Weather For Media,""Slipstream," "The Mom Egg," "Sin Fronteras," “The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics,” ”Scientific American," and "Maintenant." They are founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, and taught math in Berkeley.