Aurora Frog

We’re disembodied: Aurora, my mother of northern light, and I,
echoing through our landlines in the western hemisphere. She
muffles over the bruised-peach twilit ether about what ails
her, the litany of acquaintances’ recent deaths, distant
family gossip, how she despises old age, like Cher.
What is a diva to do in the crumbling? I sonar the outline
of her in front of the television, cathode-ray tube radiating
The Voice, vastness of suburban culture under the California
firmament. What ails her most is loneliness, she says, sunken in
the middle of the indigo sectional the size of its own country. Time
collapses there, and I’m reminded of New Zealand and the Aurora
frog, an extinct species discovered in a cave by which it was named,
vanished as soon as people shored on Te Anau, Fiordland, South Island.
I picture the frog with obsidian eyes like my mother’s. Terrestrial amphibian:
poor jumper, no vocal sac nor tympanums, but with a snout and a vestigial
tail of its tadpole attributes. In her darkened living room, drips of
faucet water resonant from the kitchen, my mother ponders
her shuddering end, nearer and nearer, cloistered in her
hypochondriac cavern. How to fathom the enormity
and smallness. When a mother passes, does a son
cease to be a son? Childless, lavender, dun poet.
It’s as if an entire genus lifts into air and before
vanishing, a twinkle in the twist of the naming:
Aurora is the dwelling.
I am the frog.