Keats thought his heart too small
to hold its blood. I’m reading his letters
at the kitchen table where a window
hangs the pepper tree in the room—what’s
outside, alive and moving in a summer wind,
contained, yet threatening to break the frame.
My mother, at 87, quavery of voice and limb,
filled an afternoon with small stories
of all the people who keep her household working:
gardener, handyman, a girl to hang the curtains—
when suddenly, “Could you remind me
how to multiply fractions?” A shy
leaf of a question that can threaten
the frame of a life. The task
we sat down to work on.
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