My mother, side-view, under the moonah tree

There’s a plainness to inner nobility,
a listening calm won from grief mastered.
So, in age, your profile portrait
comes into its own: pared down, refined,
telling a life through flesh and bone.
You sit, no viewer in sight,
looking at hazed light while looking within –
as into a tarn cupped by mountain
depths: lens to hawk, cloud, starburst.
What would I need to know, to wear sunlight
as richly, sparsely, as you do now:
your face tilted to receive the wind’s balm;
that look of earthed serenity; body
poised as a cormorant’s, wings outstretched.