137 Mother poems

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel; My fingers ache, my lips are dry: Oh! if you felt the pain I feel! But Oh, who ever felt as I! No longer could I doubt him true; All other men may use deceit: He always said my eyes were blue, And often swore my lips were sweet.

Not rain, but fine mist falls from my lemon tree, a balm of droplets in green shadow. Six years now my mother gone to earth. This dew, light as footsteps of the dead. She often walked out here, craned her neck, considered the fruit, hundreds of globes in their leathery hides, figuring on custard and pudding, meringue and hollandaise. But her plans didn't work out. The tree goes on unceasingly—lemons fall and fold into earth and begin again— me, I come here as a salve against heat, come to languish, to let the soft bursts— essence of citrus, summer's distillate— drift into my face and settle. Water and gold brew in the quiet deeps at the far end of the season. Leaves swallow the body of light and the breath of water brims over. My hands cup each other the way hers did.

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of “Mother,” Therefore by that dear name I long have called you— You who are more than mother unto me, And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you In setting my Virginia's spirit free. My mother—my own mother, who died early, Was but the mother of myself; but you Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, And thus are dearer than the mother I knew By that infinity with which my wife Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

My mother and I sit on the back porch, bare feet in summer grass as we take the upright down to pieces, breeze humming through its strings. I extract each melodic tooth and sort them in octaves for rinsing, tidy enclosure in boxes, remembering in each how my young fingers rioted over them searching for sound and the way it grows like its own unruly animal. The old piano lies open to Sunday morning sun, swallowing blossoms that drift over like stars from the apple tree I climbed as a girl. My mother and I sit here in a quiet usually reserved for churches, hands moving slowly over what we gather —piles of soft hammers, odd coils of wire. We take up wet rags and wash each wooden key down its surface, wet music pooling onto our skin.

The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, as if you were walking on the beach and found a diamond as big as a shoe; as if you had just built a wooden table and the smell of sawdust was in the air, your hands dry and woody; as if you had eluded the man in the dark hat who had been following you all week; the relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, playing the chords of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to, when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters and clean shining Republican middle-class hair walked into carpeted houses and left me alone with bare floors and a few books I want to thank my mother for working every day in a drab office in garages and water companies cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40 to lose weight, her heavy body writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers alone, with no man to look at her face, her body, her prematurely white hair in love I want to thank my mother for working and always paying for my piano lessons before she paid the Bank of America loan or bought the groceries or had our old rattling Ford repaired. I was a quiet child, afraid of walking into a store alone, afraid of the water, the sun, the dirty weeds in back yards, afraid of my mother’s bad breath, and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home, knowing he would leave again; afraid of not having any money, afraid of my clumsy body, that I knew no one would ever love But I played my way on the old upright piano obtained for $10, played my way through fear, through ugliness, through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases, and a desire to love a loveless world. I played my way through an ugly face and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights, mornings even, empty as a rusty coffee can, played my way through the rustles of spring and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California, I played my way through an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet and a bed she slept on only one side of, never wrinkling an inch of the other side, waiting, waiting, I played my way through honors in school, the only place I could talk the classroom, or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always singing the most for my talents, as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering her house and was now searching every ivory case of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black ridges and around smooth rocks, wondering where I had lost my bloody organs, or my mouth which sometimes opened like a California poppy, wide and with contrasts beautiful in sweeping fields, entirely closed morning and night, I played my way from age to age, but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely, wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling leaves of orange trees, wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me, who would be there every night to put his large strong hand over my shoulder, whose hips I would wake up against in the morning, whose mustaches might brush a face asleep, dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart and Schubert without demanding that life suck everything out of you each day, without demanding the emptiness of a timid little life. I want to thank my mother for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning when I practiced my lessons and for making sure I had a piano to lay my school books down on, every afternoon. I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years, perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets, will get lost, slide away, into the terribly empty cavern of me if I ever open it all the way up again. Love is a man with a mustache gently holding me every night, always being there when I need to touch him; he could not know the painfully loud music from the past that his loving stops from pounding, banging, battering through my brain, which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I am alone; he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me, liking the sound of my lesson this week, telling me, confirming what my teacher says, that I have a gift for the piano few of her other pupils had. When I touch the man I love, I want to thank my mother for giving me piano lessons all those years, keeping the memory of Beethoven, a deaf tortured man, in mind; of the beauty that can come from even an ugly past.

Last night she came to me, my mother, dead: but as she was in the photo, that last Christmas, wearing a red dress, and her lipstick was red (I wonder if that means she lives in hell), and I saw again that she was beautiful, the same high forehead I have, the same wide brow, and just my age, forty-nine; and now I was talking fast, because I knew I had no time, and I told her I loved her, I told her how her life had informed mine, and I begged her to come to me again, to meet my children, my wife. I said to her—My work, see what I have made, I have tried to do what you did not live to do. But she smiled at me and began to fade.

Only she who has breast-fed knows how beautiful the ear is. Only they who have been breast-fed know the beauty of the clavicle. Only to humans the Creator has given the earlobe. The humans, through clavicles slightly resembling birds, entwined in caresses fly to the place at night where, rocking the cradle of cradles, the babe is wailing, where on a pillow of air the stars nestle like toys. And some of them speak.

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are. Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family. Then back to the world, polished by soft whips. We dream; we don’t remember. Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body. Machine of the mother: white city inside her. And before that: earth and water. Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass. And before, cells in a great darkness. And before that, the veiled world. This is why you were born: to silence me. Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece. I improvised; I never remembered. Now it’s your turn to be driven; you’re the one who demands to know: Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us; it is your turn to address it, to go back asking what am I for? What am I for?

Because our family is from the countryside, Your father liked falling from high places. Limber feet make expert tree climbers. The coconut — meat for eating, fiber for the buttonmaker. Your father liked falling from high places. Upon landing, he smiles. I carry my share. The coconut — meat for eating, fiber for the buttonmaker. Where the bend in the trunk begins matters most. Upon landing, he smiles. I carry my share. Husband and wife walk home, avoiding rice paddies. Where the bend in the trunk begins matters most. Even if they are full, trees that stand straight: avoid climbing. Husband and wife walk home, avoiding rice paddies. Your grandmother warned me many times over. Even if they are full, trees that stand straight: avoid climbing. But we were young, the city called to us like a wilderness. Your grandmother warned me many times over. Saigon is big, too busy, lacking decency. But we were young, the city called to us like a wilderness. The day he died, the sun heated the cement too hot for bare feet. Saigon is big, too busy, lacking decency. Afterwards, home brought no comfort. The day he died, the sun heated the cement too hot for bare feet. The New World Hotel stands fourteen stories. Afterwards, home brought no comfort, Because tragedy cannot save face. The New World Hotel stands fourteen stories. Everyone here must remember my new dress last fall, Because tragedy cannot save face. Our neighbors recount our tale with great skill and detail. Everyone here must remember my new dress last fall. With the white of his palms alone, your father made us a living. Our neighbors recount our tale with great skill and detail. The palm trees out front aren’t tall enough. With the white of his palms alone, your father made us a living. Even when we were promised, I could see he had ability. The palm trees out front aren’t tall enough. Mind your father, improve yourself, head upwards. Even when we were promised, I could see he had ability. He climbed until he got us to the city. Mind your father, improve yourself, head upwards. Limber feet make expert tree climbers. Because our family is from the countryside, He climbed until he got us to the city.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.