My Neighbor Florence, Age 96, Recounts Her Life to Me and Then Continues to Live

On her deathbed she strains not to leave the heaviness
of the sky, which is part of a heaviness made up
of once thick thighs that thundered in two tones after dark
when she was only a daughter
who danced by lifting the lips of her flowered, flowing skirts,
it is also made up of the heaviness 
of guttural grunts, like those of horses that gallop 
over the grass and humps of hills 
with tails that tip the sky and tear the air, 
made up of the notes sung by many men 
that she swore could heal her,
men who slurped sex without their pinkies up,
it is made of the heaviness that grounded her guts
deep in her belly sockets and twisted her hair 
into the hands of so many lovers
who turned out not to be lovers,
made up of the heaviness
that turned her laughter to carbonated holiness
turned her tears to something heartier, made the world 
solid enough to swallow after holding it on the tongue, 
and later, it was made up of the heaviness
of a man she loved 
who committed murder 
when it wasn’t called murder
in the war, of the broadness of his shoulders
against her skin and the slow slipping
of their flesh pressed together 
and of a gold ring on her finger 
that’s weighted her hand for 70 years, and of all this waiting 
while he’s been drifting 
lonely in heaven or hell, made up of death
yes, death, and of birth 
and of the heaviness of her braid and of her brain,
of her breasts and of her voice, 
the heaviness of her womb, long inactive, 
of the warm brown blankets bundled over her wrinkled legs,
made up of her daughters singing at her bedside
with rasped whispers
the many songs she gave them
in their childhood, 
she tells me it’s as if their lips release her and she drifts 
endless in time. But I, twenty-something, 
only quarter-laden with years and half-hearted 
cannot hold this all within me, wondering
how she strains against it all and why
when it seems to me she could stop straining 
and just let go.