I was maybe twelve and my mother
came home from grocery shopping.
It was a hot day in mid-summer
and as I lifted a bag from the trunk
the bottom ripped and a bottle
of red wine fell and shattered
on the driveway, the wine bleeding
into the asphalt and my mother
looked down and burst into tears
for the little dirt farm she grew up on
in Illinois, for my father dead
of scotch, for the pistol her brother
put to his head, for everything lost
and for the crummy little house
in a sunbaked California subdivision,
for the double shifts at the nursing home,
the Olds leaking oil, for everything
she could never give us, for the night
ahead of her in front of the TV,
sitcoms and Carson, stone cold sober.