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DocuSign Envelope ID:3E2A8197-2735-44CA-8810-5AD399233576 <br /> Pam Baggett <br /> 8800 Wilkerson Road <br /> Cedar Grove NC 27231 <br /> 919-732-9403 <br /> nightair@mindspring.com <br /> What Passes Through This World Sounds Like Crying <br /> Midnight. I walk beyond the reach <br /> of lights into rough-mown pasture, soak <br /> my shoes in the day's late shower.A full moon <br /> gleams through clouds like high-beams <br /> through fog, silhouettes two geese that soar <br /> overhead, one silent but for its wingbeats, <br /> the other squawking its distress. <br /> At the nursing home where I've spent <br /> three panicked days, my mother's learning <br /> to sleep until wakened by strangers <br /> who come to change her sodden diaper, <br /> careful with the purple wound, black stitches <br /> of her broken left hip. They tell me she clings <br /> to the bed rail, wails my name. <br /> In daylight, she watches every car <br /> that enters the parking lot, looks a question <br /> at me with each strange new sound: the blast <br /> of air when the door opens, intended to keep out <br /> flies, the beep-beep of a truck backing up. <br /> It's the questions I can't answer— <br /> how the brain smooths to calm unrippled <br /> water, tiny flickers <br /> of thought, how the body outlives <br /> its memory of putting fork <br /> to mouth, of thirst, <br /> how a woman <br /> becomes a silhouette of herself— <br /> Questions that send me out, disturbed <br /> as geese frightened from a pond <br /> where they'd hoped to drift <br /> through the warm humid night, <br /> lush with the scent of wild roses, <br /> a whippoorwill that won't stop <br /> its plaintive song. <br /> Slated to appear in Crab Orchard Review <br />