As the Cold Deepens

She is eighty-six
and her friends are dying.
"They're dropping like flies," she grumbles
and I see black winged bodies crumbling
on window sills when we open our summer house.

Flies all over!
Brushing them onto the floor, sweeping
them up, we drop black mounds into the bag.
"What a mess!" my mother declares.

I think of flies how they live in a weightless armor
tough, resistant like a finger nail.

My mother is almost weightless now,
her flesh shrinks back toward bone.
Braced in her metal walker
she haunts the halls, prowls
the margin of her day, indomitable
erect in this support
that fuses steel with self.

At noon the flies mass on the sills
flying up and down the pane
pressing for sun.
What buzzing agitates the air
as the swarm becomes a single drive
a scramble up, a dizzy spin.

It is hard to hold the light
which grows weaker every day.
The temperature is falling
The glass is cold.

written by Elizabeth W. Holden

I worked in a home specifically for the elderly with dementia. This was the last home they were ever going to live in. Families who no longer were able to care for their parents and spouses who were no longer strong enough to keep their loves at home came to us. This was a home where they came to live and stayed to die. I had been through a number of deaths in the three years I was there. In this world of mental health, the caregivers have to keep a certain mind set in order to deal with numerous deaths of people whom they've grown to love. We knew the old superstitions about things happening in threes. So as soon as two residents would die, we would wait for the third. In our cold-seeming frame of mind, we would say that they were dropping like flies. I know the imagery this poem was showing because I've been there up close many times.