A five hour road trip and three hours of moving my daughter
back into her dormitory have left me hot and tired, a refugee in
a downtown Minneapolis hotel.  Nevertheless, I feel obliged to call
an elderly aunt whom I have seen a total of four times over the last
quarter century.  When she answers, her reedy voice quavers with
a peculiar tone of strident urgency, and she asks ? no, she insists
that we drive out to visit her and my uncle at their west-side
suburb, really the last thing on my mind this humid, smoldering
late-summer afternoon with threatening-looking rain-clouds already
thundering across the plains off to the west. So I regrettably decline
her frantic request and tell her that such a trip would be nigh on
impossible, which is something that my aunt does not want to hear
because she obsessively repeats her wish with her former urgency
now turned to a tone of sheer desperation.  A captive of exhaustion,
I do not take the hint, nor can I hear her real message, the one
vibrating up from her heart like a call from the other world
to which only she knows she will soon go.

This poem first appeared in the 2008 Wisconsin Poets' Calendar.
Used here with the author's permission.