Silver Secrets

My computer allows me

to peer into an osprey nest

high above birches

in an Estonian forest.

Celebrating life, I remember

death. I see only my mother,

cold and lifeless at three a.m.,

in a hospital room across town.

The irony of time haunts

my enjoyment of the intimacy

of nature—a mother tending

her hatchlings--oblivious

to the miles that separate

watcher and watched, and I

wonder if she sees them, too.

How she loved driving

by the osprey nest high

above the road, straining

to see the bird she'd only seen

in pictures in her worn book.

Transported from Missouri

to Minnesota, she still marveled

that she had traveled, had

summered out of state.

And now, I can see what

she would have loved to have seen.

The unfairness of time's advance

causes me to look away, deny my gaze.