Echolalia

My mother has moments
when she remembers things
that never happened
and she describes them
with a specificity that stills
my heart. She wanted to adopt
in 1963 but her in-laws wouldn’t let her
and she knows a lady—sometimes
it’s a man—whose rabbit wears a silk
scarf knotted loosely around its neck.
I wonder if there’s anything true
in these stories, an artifact, a spark,
a single detail, and I search for it,
befuddled. A dead star still
shines, its light carries across
the miles and the years, that cold
expanse between what is lost
and what we still can see.
We caught a firefly once, I want to say,
we caught it between flashes,
imagining where it might be and reaching
into the darkness. It shone
like a filament inside our net,
a flicker in the stillness before
flying out with dead sure certainty
the way every living thing knows
how to be born.