Tug Dumbly - Arvening

Arvening 

A boy enters quiet, and there’s the tiny shock

to catch a dropped face, faintly sainted

and suffused in suffering she stands

at the suffering sink, counter sunk

in unmoored light. His Mother no more

but a beast unawares, pastured in night,

asleep on its feet to an elsewhere tethered life.

Tear trek dried through floured cheek,

onion hands to apron thighs, she lost

and profound in the arvening glow

of orange-pink haloing a yard overgrown,

this light brimming eye and spilling lip

of a kitchen window, bathing a face sagged

to its natural resting place, that unmade face

they most met in long ago, ripened to windfall,

to the goodness and sadness of a patient mango.