137 Mother poems

The last time he cut his mother’s hair the rude morning sun left no corner of her kitchen private, the light surgically clean where it fell on his scissors. Her hair fell in a blonde circle on the lake blue tile—smell of coffee and cinnamon; her laughing shook her head,Hold still, he said, his hands surfeit with the curl and softness of her hair. Three weeks after her death, a stranger entered the salon and settled in the chair. She had the color and shape of his mother’s hair, and when he sunk his hands in it, the texture, even cowlicks, individual as freckles—same. Twice he had to leave the room, and twice, he returned—still, when he touched her hair, it blurred. Hold still, he said,hold still.

All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self Mothers hum nonsense, driving here and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting how faint reflections shiver over the road All the deafening musts along the way Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun— there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone This is enough to wrench our hand out of his and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it

Mother is drinking to forget a man who could fill the woods with invitations: come with me he whispered and she went in his Nash Rambler, its dash where her knees turned green in the radium dials of the 50's. When I drink it is always 1953, bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street and mother, wrist deep in red water, laying a trail from the sink to a glass of gin and back. She is a beautiful, unlucky woman in love with a man of lechery so solid you could build a table on it and when you did the blues would come to visit. I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner, the dark slung across the porch, and then mother’s dress falling to the floor, buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate. When I drink I am too much like her— the knife in one hand and the trout with a belly white as my wrist. I have loved you all my life she told him and it was true in the same way that all her life she drank, dedicated to the act itself, she stood at this stove and with the care of the very drunk handed him the plate.

The best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact. My mother took my heart out. She banked it on top of her stove. It glowed white. She put it back in my chest. Tita knew that overseas workers often had affairs. He licked me and I pretended it pinged through my body like a swift idea That I wrote about and considered like a bell of good craftsmanship. He also knew that their kids ate better He said your belly is like a cat’s. He said with his bowl up to his chin More please. At night the fireflies come out. They flock to my window. I put my hands up against the screen. I think how fragile it is to be inside a house. They say I want permission I paint my face. I say—just take it. Easy. If equally matched, we can offer battle. If unequal in any way, we can flee from him. Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages. I thought a lot about walking around at night. By myself. Just to think. But I never did. I thought I could just flick a switch. When I was born, my mother and father gave me a gardenia like personal star. Don’t you hate it when someone apologizes all the time? It’s like they are not even sorry.

Aunt. Don’t ask me how I come to address my mother thus. Long complex, complicated stories: heart-warmingly familial and sadly colonial. You know how utterly, wonderfully insensitive the young can be? Oh no. We are not here talking adults who should know better but never do. Aunt, I thank you for being alive today, alert, crisp. Since we don’t know tomorrow, see me touching wood, clutching at timbers, hugging forests: So I can enter young, age, infirmities defied. Hear my offspring chirping: “Mummy, touch plastic, it lasts longer!” O, she knows her mama well. The queen of plastics a tropical Bedouin, she must travel light. Check out the wood, feel its weight, its warmth check out the beauty of its lines, and perfumed shavings. Back to you, My Dear Mother, I can hear the hailing chorus at the drop of your name. And don’t I love to drop it here, there, and everywhere? Not missing out by time of day, not only when some chance provides, but pulled and dragged into talks private and public. Listen to the “is-your-mother-still-alive” greeting, eyes popping out, mouth agape and trembling: That here, in narrow spaces and not-much-time, who was I to live? Then she who bore me? Me da ase. Ye de ase.

This is a poem on my other’s body, I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one who saved her braid of blue-black hair in a drawer when I was little. Meaning one I could lean against — against not in resistance. Fuzzy dress of wuzzy one. Red lipstick one. Kitchen one. Her one to me, bad-ger bad-ger — or so I heard. The one body I write on like Daddy’s blank studio wall with my colored pencils. About seeing her skin as she bathed in the afternoon — was I five? It was summer. Then today’s winter where again I call that bath to mind. I cannot leave her body alone. Which is how I found Mother in the bath escaping the heat of a 1950s house, Father on a ladder with blowtorch to scrape the paint off the outside. • badger badger • The sun in the suburbs simmered the tar roof over our rooms in the town where only wasps lived inside paper cells beneath eaves and roots. And they hurt very much, the wasps. • Now I am sixty. Sweet as dried papaya. My hair, a bit tarnished, my inmost, null. Memory is failing away as if an image shattered to shards then recollected for a kaleidoscope: I click the pieces into sharp arrangements — grouse, crow, craven — no, now, my own daughter turns sovereign

I saw my mother standing there below me On the narrow bank just looking out over the river Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope Of the braided swirling currents Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky There are some things we know before we know Also some things we wish we would not ever know Even if as children we already knew & so Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings I knew I could never even fate willing ever Get to her in time

My mother sends me a black-and-white photograph of   her and my father, circa 1968, posing with two Indian men. “Who are those Indian guys?” I ask her on the phone. “I don’t know,” she says. The next obvious question: “Then why did you send me this photo?” But I don’t ask it. One of those strange Indian men is pointing up toward the sky. Above them, a bird shaped like a question mark.

My mother spoke perfectly well, and I understood. Fabi andá faser los deber, and I’d do my chores. Fabi traseme meio litro de leite, I brought her half a liter of milk. Desí pra doña Cora que amañá le pago — I told Doña Cora she’d get paid tomorrow. Deya iso gurí— stop that, child — and I would stop. But my teacher didn’t understand. She’d send home letters in my notebook all in red, like her face, and signed at the bottom. But my mother didn’t understand. Le iso pra mim, ijo, and I’d read them to her. But my mother didn’t understand. Qué fiseste meu fío— what did you do, child — te dise a que portaras bien, and I did behave myself. The story repeated itself for months. My teacher wrote, but my mother didn’t understand. My teacher wrote, but my mother didn’t understand. Then one day my mother understood. She said,Meu fío, tu terás que deiyá la iscuela— so I quit that school. Translated from the Portuñol

My mother had two faces and a frying pot where she cooked up her daughters into girls before she fixed our dinner. My mother had two faces and a broken pot where she hid out a perfect daughter who was not me I am the sun and moon and forever hungry for her eyes. I bear two women upon my back one dark and rich and hidden in the ivory hungers of the other mother pale as a witch yet steady and familiar brings me bread and terror in my sleep her breasts are huge exciting anchors in the midnight storm. All this has been before in my mother's bed time has no sense I have no brothers and my sisters are cruel. Mother I need mother I need mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain. I am the sun and moon and forever hungry the sharpened edge where day and night shall meet and not be one.