To listen to Mark Cox reading “Finish This,” click here.

When gram died, her last act

was to hand back a dixie cup

half trembling with water

as if to say, “here, finish this.”

My mother took it, separating the fingers,

thin and glossy with illness,

then guiding the whole arm down

to its place across her chest.

I was on the other side,

the hospital bed rail

pushing one cool shirt button into me

as if I were a doorbell. “I’m out here,”

Death was saying, “You don’t have a lot of time,

you coming or not?”

The railing gave a little, sideways,

and since there was nothing left

but those most accidental of sounds—

the involuntary frictions of left/right,

up/down, in/out,

the sound of a loose tire iron

in the back of a pick-up,

of two emaciated swords

meeting farther and farther away—

that final letting go of the guard

by which all week she had pulled herself up toward me,

was a release into silence, a recognition

of the true completeness of every gesture.

And having relayed to me that dry, barely tangible kiss,

she could stop now, thereby seeming calmly to recede.

Outside, the cold white ashes of eons

piled high against the curbs

and Death leaned on his shovel

near a narrow, heavily salted path into underground parking,

and the car stalled,

and it seemed for a moment,

the past so completely with me, so heavy and sodden,

I’d never turn the key again.

That was when I remembered the dixie cup,

the pale purple lilacs ringing its lip,

and how my mother raised it like a shot glass to her own mouth

then chose merely to sip.