Your fin-quick gaze

            now swims into view, ex-convent eyes

long uncloistered: 
a mother’s face is a lifetime

            of faces, voluminously lined and luminous,

now distracted by this
real time letter. Each flourish

            of your hand blurs its swish, the back

wash of bytes. 
I’ve spent a life emerging

            from my image of you, and now you’ve gone

amniotic. We were born
to each other, mother

            and first child—our heartpumps that rhumba

when thrilled or exhausted,
lungs that seize in cold,

            backs we throw out, lock us in bed for days.

In a failed poem, I once wrote
if the sky were a voice, it would

            be yours. The years rub it to a fluted rasp,

raspier over the audio
of compressed memory.

            My daughters—reason for this spectral

reunion—crowd the screen,
invisible bits of you

            coiled in them, their binary pool

of ancestral light.

When we watch your eyes,

            we see you looking down to where we must be

looking on your screen, 
a frame below the frame of us

            looking down to you. As if a picture turns out

to be a window— 
though we’re locked inside

            our distant homes, and the window itself

is what’s raining. 
Something in us

            loves this earth, this flesh, but not enough

to cease our flailing 
against its faithful

            magnetic pull. Only a day’s drive away, too far

to feel this close. 
Wordsworth-worshipper,

            you always read my mind, nerve networks

open as web pages. 
Today, the headline—

            “A mission to the moon with no return

in mind.” We’re digital 
immigrants exiled

            from taste of your breath, the hum your lungs

thrum when you’re happy 
to see us, the bird

            -quick movement of you in the room,

and the room in you.