a mother at ten pm, monday night

for a half hour, thirty minutes, black line around the clock and Lola's piano music on cellular background, i did not know if you were ok. a headache, an illness, the last time anyone talked to you was at 7am. your friend wrote me! your friend. this is strange, too strange, and one by one the list of who hadn't talked to you, who received no call back, no return text, grew: your father, your grandmother, your friend, myself. i heard your voice in the message ' leave a message ' for a half hour, i was stuck here on the ends of the earth, suspended above Dante's inferno, the heat licking sickening my stomach and a spiritual hypochondria awash in my cells. for a half hour i was almost the damned, almost crossed the veil, lost my mind, never knew the meaning of anything only the black hole of its loss. are we doomed to understand loss more deeply than love? i do not live there because the phone rang, and it was your soft voice, the voice of my heart and own cosmos, the center of gravity and meaning, everything it cannot be and cannot hold, life in one. life in one. ' don't put all your eggs in one basket ' my mississippi grandma said. all my eggs, in four baskets, and still with one blow, i would be as shattered as if the universe melted with the ice caps and i slipped through the cracks to the endless spinning, the unknowing and knowing of loss, the free fall curvature of where love goes we follow, we have no choice, we follow.