Irene Willis
Home Movies
I thought at first they were acting:
my mother pretending to be old,
her pantomime of dying;
my brother’s vaudeville turn,
coughing, playing delirium;
my father clutching his chest,
falling, the way they do in movies—
and my husband, bent in a charade
he must have learned from a comic strip,
an old man saying Eh, hand on one
arthritic hip, or at the sink, counting pills
into a box that measures days.
