The Tides

by David Cazden

―Portland Oregon, 1970

Crouching at my grandmother's

dressing room door,

I watch her comb her hair

layered like silver pines.

She dabs on rouge

the color of an Oregon sunrise

just below the tungsten

filaments of her eyes.

Visiting next year

her eyesight's full of clouds.

We bring her from the hospital

bandaged after cataracts

needing two weeks in bed,

so I prowl the house unseen―

past tables of coral, china,

by a bowl of scalloped soap

scented fuchsia, rose

as if from her hillside garden

where I first gazed at Mt. Hood, 

St. Helens, The Three Sisters in white veils

of mist and distance.

With bones seabird-thin,

I stoop in her dressing room's

secluded cove

and pick her earrings up

like agates

we would gather

at Sauvie's island.

Swaying in the current,

I steal into her closet

and slide her favorite dress

sheer as a summer evening

across my shoulders.

For a moment, I become her―

a woman at the ocean's edge,

not seeing but feeling

every movement of the water

where I reach

into a furrow in the tides.