Translation

My Mother’s Day card arrives late again this year. 
As usual, she says long-distance. 
I’d miscalculated again, hoping that this once
there’d still be time.
I’d picked the message You drove me all over town and
I drove you up the wall — let’s call it even,
after she’d denied that it was because she
had me lie down whenever I felt carsick
that I fall asleep in any moving vehicle, even now. 
But when the card arrives, she writes back only   
Next time, a translation.

Once she wrote her thesis on Hemingway,
taught me the alphabets of two languages,
drove me to and from the library all summer. 
And this is how far we have come
apart in different places now. 
And into what words can I translate
myself, ask forgiveness for misreading
our trajectories, the time it takes
to cross oceans and deserts unspoken? 
For failing the mother tongue of small silences,
a language in which she’s long forgotten
how she used to tell me to close my eyes,
that I’d feel better then, that
we were almost there.