My Mother’s Change

M. A. Istvan, Jr.

I was angry to see my mother bouncing
free to the pop music that throbbed
through Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
It was not just her public lack of restraint.
The other dorm-shopping grandmas
were at it as well in their university tees.
It was that the music was pop. Lady Gaga.

When she asked me to consider music
for her funeral, I thought of that time.
I knew so well the soundtrack of her life.
But that was not her wish. She refused
Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,”
Reich’s “Its Gonna Rain.” Death, she said,
was a form of letting go to the crowd.

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