137 Mother poems

Now in thy dazzling half-oped eye, Thy curled nose and lip awry, Uphoisted arms and noddling head, And little chin with crystal spread, Poor helpless thing! what do I see, That I should sing of thee? From thy poor tongue no accents come, Which can but rub thy toothless gum: Small understanding boasts thy face, Thy shapeless limbs nor step nor grace: A few short words thy feats may tell, And yet I love thee well. When wakes the sudden bitter shriek, And redder swells thy little cheek When rattled keys thy woes beguile, And through thine eyelids gleams the smile, Still for thy weakly self is spent Thy little silly plaint. But when thy friends are in distress. Thou’lt laugh and chuckle n’ertheless, Nor with kind sympathy be smitten, Though all are sad but thee and kitten; Yet puny varlet that thou art, Thou twitchest at the heart. Thy smooth round cheek so soft and warm; Thy pinky hand and dimpled arm; Thy silken locks that scantly peep, With gold tipped ends, where circle deep, Around thy neck in harmless grace, So soft and sleekly hold their place, Might harder hearts with kindness fill, And gain our right goodwill. Each passing clown bestows his blessing, Thy mouth is worn with old wives’ kissing; E’en lighter looks the gloomy eye Of surly sense when thou art by; And yet, I think, whoe’er they be, They love thee not like me. Perhaps when time shall add a few Short years to thee, thou’lt love me too; And after that, through life’s long way, Become my sure and cheering stay; Wilt care for me and be my hold, When I am weak and old. Thou’lt listen to my lengthened tale, And pity me when I am frail — But see, the sweepy spinning fly Upon the window takes thine eye. Go to thy little senseless play; Thou dost not heed my lay.

I had a fascination with your dresses — the greens, brocades, the belted shapes which spoke of you more poignantly than the photos in their careful frames. Your shoes were their own country, the heels, satins, the inexplicable mud — I scraped them with small fingernails, marveling at the gorgeous debris, wishing I had a microscope. I searched your handbags, examined them for signs, evidence — where you were going, where you had been: tickets, lipstick, inked hieroglyphics, a broken comb. I even smelled your stockings, sniffing at the crotches like a dog, frantic for any trace of you, my eyes raking their length, wondering at ladders, searching for clues. My father came upon me once, cross-legged on the floor, his sad smile telling me more than any detection — he took my hand, and closed the door.

My mother sleeps with the Bible open on her pillow; she reads herself to sleep and wakens startled. She listens for her heart: each breath is shallow. For years her hands were quick with thread and needle. She used to sew all night when we were little; now she sleeps with the Bible on her pillow and believes that Jesus understands her sorrow: her children grown, their father frail and brittle; she stitches in her heart, her breathing shallow. Once she even slept fast, rushed tomorrow, mornings full of sunlight, sons and daughters. Now she sleeps alone with the Bible on her pillow and wakes alone and feels the house is hollow, though my father in his blue room stirs and mutters; she listens to him breathe: each breath is shallow. I flutter down the darkened hallway, shadow between their dreams, my mother and my father, asleep in rooms I pass, my breathing shallow. I leave the Bible open on her pillow.

beside me in this garden are huge and daisy-like (why not? are not oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?), shrubby and thick-stalked, the leaves pointing up the stems from which the flowers burst in sunbursts. I love this garden in all its moods, even under its winter coat of salt hay, or now, in October, more than half gone over: here a rose, there a clump of aconite. This morning one of the dogs killed a barn owl. Bob saw it happen, tried to intervene. The airedale snapped its neck and left it lying. Now the bird lies buried by an apple tree. Last evening from the table we saw the owl, huge in the dusk, circling the field on owl-silent wings. The first one ever seen here: now it’s gone, a dream you just remember. The dogs are barking. In the studio music plays and Bob and Darragh paint. I sit scribbling in a little notebook at a garden table, too hot in a heavy shirt in the mid-October sun into which the Korean mums all face. There is a dull book with me, an apple core, cigarettes, an ashtray. Behind me the rue I gave Bob flourishes. Light on leaves, so much to see, and all I really see is that owl, its bulk troubling the twilight. I’ll soon forget it: what is there I have not forgot? Or one day will forget: this garden, the breeze in stillness, even the words, Korean mums.

My mother–half-deaf, a small metal box pinned to her blouse, and beneath the gray locks the hidden earphone, the wire running across her heart to its home in her ear–can barely hear me anymore. I’m just someone’s voice lost years ago, trying now to make myself clear, deliberately now, so she will see how hard the words come. Bent to her breast, I speak to the heart, almost hopeless, where hardly anyone is ever heard.

The girl grew and grew, her mother couldn’t stop it; it terrorized. What would the finger-dance do? Kindergarten art a buffet of 
markers, gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer’s pools drying clear. A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper into paper-bag dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers. And silver rain. And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored in reverse rainbow. Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles. A bird. Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane, and knowledge: that the sky’s full of black-struck M s and W s, drifting clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn’t reach down to meet the earth; mother shrinks to the size of a penis.

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary? Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder: I must tramp on through the winter night dreary, While the snow falls on me colder and colder. You are my one, and I have not another; Sleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure; Sleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother, Dreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure.

We loved them. We got up early to toast their bagels. Wrapped them in foil. We filled their water bottles and canteens. We washed and bleached their uniforms, the mud and dirt and blood washed clean of brutality. We marveled at their bodies, thighs thick as the trunk of a spindle pine, shoulders broad and able, the way their arms filled out. The milk they drank. At the plate we could make out their particular stance, though each wore the same uniform as if they were cadets training for war. If by chance one looked up at us and gave us a rise with his chin, or lifted a hand, we beamed. We had grown used to their grunts, mumbles, and refusal to form a full sentence. We made their beds and rifled through their pockets and smelled their shirts to see if they were clean. How else would we know them? We tried to not ask too many questions and not to overpraise. Sometimes they were ashamed of us; if we laughed too loud, if one of us talked too long to their friend, of our faces that had grown coarser. Can’t you put on lipstick? We let them roll their eyes, curse, and grumble at us after a game if they’d missed a play or lost. We knew to keep quiet; the car silent the entire ride home. What they were to us was inexplicable. Late at night, after they were home in their beds, we sat by the window and wondered when they would leave us and who they would become when they left the cocoon of our instruction. What kind of girl they liked. We sat in a group and drank our coffee and prayed that they’d get a hit. If they fumbled a ball or struck out we felt sour in the pit of our stomach. We paced. We couldn’t sit still or talk. Throughout summer we watched the trees behind the field grow fuller and more vibrant and each fall slowly lose their foliage— it was as if we wanted to hold on to every and each leaf.

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while, at her expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all the mornings afterward of Hush and Just stand still, to make some small amends for every reg- iment- ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss, I did as I was told for once, gave up my map, let Emma lead us through the woods “by instinct,” as the drunkard knew the natural prince. We had no towels, we had no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels call them here, and I am summer’s dullest hand at un- premeditated moves. But when the coppice of sheltering boxwood disclosed its path and posted rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed poor excuse. The ladies in their lumpy variety lay on their public half-acre of lawn, the water lay in dappled shade, while Emma in her underwear and I in an ill- fitting borrowed suit availed us of the breast stroke and a modified crawl. She’s eight now. She will rather die than do this in a year or two and lobbies, even as we swim, to be allowed to cut her hair. I do, dear girl, I will give up this honey-colored metric of augmented thirds, but not (shall we climb on the raft for a while?) not yet.

They listen to the myna birds dicker in the grass. The child’s blue shoes are caked with garden dirt. When he runs, she sees the antics of a pair of wrens. She works the garden, a pot of rusting gardenias has given off its ales and infused the danker germinations of her grief. She watches her son chase pigeons, kick at the leaves piled high. Now, a magpie adds to his cascades of laughter as he runs with the hose, pours a fine spray, happy to be giving to the grass this silver courtship. She sighs, watches the drops settle in. Today, who can explain the sadness she feels. Surely this day is to be treasured: the sun out, the breeze like a cat’s tongue licking a moon of milk; her son expending himself in small, public bursts, happy among clover where bees hover, and unfold centrefolds of nectar. Today, who can explain the heaviness in her head, as if all her worries were tomes toward a larger work, one she knows she will never finish, but to which she must keep adding, thought by thought. She sweeps the petals, smells their russet imprint. Soon dusk will come with an envoy of smoke and her son outlast her patience by a rose. Already he is tiring, puling at the flowers. It won’t be long before they’ll go in, listen to the jug purr comfort. He’ll sleep and she’ll lie back, or get up to unhook the cry of her cat from the wire door. Now, a few cicadas are idling, giving each other the gun and a cockatoo calls, a haughty felon. She sighs, knowing she won’t escape her mood today, the turned earth or its rank persuasions; her child’s petulance flaring like an orchid, or a cockatoo’s unruly crest. Today, she knows she will need to consider her unhappiness, of what she is a prisoner – if not the loss of hope’s particulars. Her son soaks the path, rinses the sky of its featureless blue. He is giving that water, now, to everything.