An Excuse

"Your tomatoes are dying,"

my mother calls me on the telephone.
"Aphids," my mother says.

I come home to see her
the plant, I mean,

stems heaving and drooping.
"Didn't you watch her while I was gone?" I ask.
My mother keeps quiet

I finger her fuzzy leaves--

soft as the skin on a baby's ear.

I spend the day swathing soapy liquids

over her undersides.
My mother watches from across the porch.

the brown specks cling and twitch

about her vein-y reaches.

"I knew it was something

when green ones stopped coming,"

my mother says.

I eye the dying tomatoes:

(deflated. Crimson

and puckered).

and then my mother,

standing in the door way,

hip pressed into the sliding door.

We both flick our fingernails

when we are thinking