Two American rosefinches visited my mother before she died. Their song is a rapid, cheery warble. It was mid-May, and the flower garden kept time like a sundial.

My mother sat on the back porch every morning, except the last, and smoked Eve 120s while she drank coffee. I sat with her to watch the hummingbirds hover around the feeder like little iridescent angels.

Seven hills separate my boyhood home from town: cropduster, cows, baitman, welder, razed house, pond like a mirror, and metal gate. These hills you pass too while the funeral man ferries you to your final resting place.

The cancer in her pancreas grew under her nightgown to a great swelling, proximate to the place I grew as well, fifty years before.

My mother, a beautician, read romance novels. In one, the author described many things a woman could do to a man's cock. These books were my secret reading when I was twelve.

The crest and valley of rolling land is a power so slow even time seems to stop in the long crashing of its geologic wave.

The last day she raised herself like a miracle to walk to the bathroom. I secreted a final photo of her in bed and still carry the weight of this transgression. She is mostly skin and bones, and her hands are crossed on her chest as if she is a noblewoman.

Bone is a mineralized matrix of collagen and various salts. In neutral soil, the skeleton persists for hundreds of years before falling to pieces.

In dry, salty, or anoxic soils, bones may undergo fossilization and persist forever.

Near Saturday evening, mom's breathing became irregular ... in but not out ... out but not in.

The nurse’s aide, there from hospice, which Mom finally allowed that week, said, "This is it."

And then a last visceral in, followed by a long out, like a slow-moving landslide coming to rest at the bottom of a hill.

The hospice supervisor, the one with the license that allowed her to declare someone legally dead, could not find our home. GPS, in its complex triangulations of space and time, led her to a dark stretch of empty pines on a deserted country road.

So, my mother's official time of death is six hours after she died.

What we found in her junk drawers: Christmas bobs, scrap paper, screws, keys, checks, broken cordless phones, the cards we sent, calendars, cash, candles, silver coins.

At the moment of my mother's death, I crawled beside her on the bed, touched her forehead and called her "sweetie."

What is it like to regard the air as an extravagance? And mundane?

Every room in her home was a distant field she would never visit again, though the burgeoning bluestem filled the land like a Holy Ghost.

Her spirit passed through the screen door and floated like a colloquy of feathers to the dark recesses of Big Creek.

Does lyricism convert memory to enduring crystalline form? An outcropping of fiction where, briefly, we stand?

If only we could tie bells to the feet of the dead so we could find them in our dreams. But I seldom dream of the dead. I dream of houses.

After Mom died, my brother refused to shoot her cat, Tiger, even though no one could catch him, and no one was there to feed him, and nothing else could be done but let him go hungry and disappear.

In one of my favorite photos, my mother walks with my two young children, their backs to me in spring-break abandon, through a field of wild grasses hungry for life.