Euthanasia

Beyond Tornado Alley, my youngest brother
sleeps with his new family, a speck
in the forefinger of Florida--the state,
I hear, where the elderly go, not to die,
but to finish the final few pages
of their lives. Is it no wonder our father
and his second wife sent his age-sick mother
to some retirement home in Tennessee?
Even now, my brother speaks in nonchalance's
flatlined tongue of their dozen cats,
the lucky few inside (outside, the living
green of the yard hides a doubled clowder),
and each of their names: Shadow, Baby, Tiger...
it goes on--and how easy they are to replace:
Sickly? The answer was quick, painless, and
easy, just as each evening while the light bled
into a new horizon, the memory of birth-home,
the snow-misted mountains, our blood-mother,
myself--the terrible novel of eyes closing
into a deeper darkness, never again to open.