Words

Late afternoon I speak to Mum on the phone;
she’s sorting through her past,
four hundred or so odd-sized photographs.
‘Well, you won’t want to do it,’
she says, ‘when I’m gone,
I won’t leave you that task.’
We switch tack, not from fear,
from silent truth, what can’t come back.
We talk of mulish rough weather,
April squalls, the wind’s choking embrace
of a newly dressed willow, bringing it down,
its road wreckage near her place.
Dad’s death was like that tree.
She talks in tangents. Is this what she means?