137 Mother poems

From the guts of the house, I hear my mother crying for her mother and wish I understood the principles of tranquility. How to rest the mind on a likeness of a blast furnace framed in formica by anon. A photo of lounge chairs with folded tartan lap robes. An untitled typology of industrial parks. The gentle interface of yawn and nature. It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow under the smartificial xmas tree. After studying Comparative Reality I began Die Polyvinylchloride Tannenbaumserie. Turn off that tiny tasteful star, I commanded. While you’re alive there’s no time for minor amazements. Turn off the sallow pages of your paralegal pad. I don’t need a light to think of you. I don’t need a god to pray. Some things are glow alone. I said one thing you said you remembered I said. Was it will you be my trophy friend? Or are you someone else’s difficult person? I mean the more myself I become the less intelligible I seem to otters. I know what you mean you said. It’s like the time I was compelled to speak on hedonism to the monks and nuns. Did I say most religion is devotional expediency? Or religion doesn’t worry about being religious, its wisdom corrupted by its brilliance as light passing near the sun is deflected in its path. Deep in its caprices, the whole body thinks it’s understood. To think otterwise is isolating. When I said hedonism stressed cheerfulness, there were disappointed groans. Look, I’m sorry I gave you an ornament shaped like a hollow look. I liked its trinket brightness. Just don’t give me a water tower dressed up as a church steeple or one of those silly thunderstorms that hang around volcanoes. See how those teardrop lights make every object jump? The memory does. You made me love. Was it exile in honey is still exile? Am I the fire or just another flame? Please sell me an indulgence, I begged a monk. And tell me what creature, what peril, could craft that sound that night dropped like a nubile sliver in my ear. There is no freedom of silence when morture forces us to speak from organs other than the heart. It was something about love. A far cry. It was come to me unmediated, go to god lengths. In great things, the attempt alone is sufficient. I think this ’cause I’m finite. That’s an understanding to which reason can only aspire though an entire speech community labored for generations to say it in a fair hand clearly dated and scented with lavender. My one and only only a crass color orgy will see us through the dusk ahead, the months gray as donkey. See how it grows its own cross of fur and bears it on its back? I showed you that.

If your house is a dress it’ll fit like Los Angeles red sun burning west, deserts, fields, for certain it will drape even a boy no less boy in disrepair wandering from shore to crest, others mistake his searching for despair, no, never, but for thirst, cloaked as he is, warm, radiant in a house dress.

—no matter how much muscle I might have mustered—my mother was like to come along behind, reach around me to take it up again from where I’d left it, lift it back into my line of vision and in one practiced motion from that strangle in her bare hands and thin air work a second miraculous stream of silver dishwash into the day’s last gleam . . .

I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels she too will   share in this act   of love my own mother says it was not meant to be cruel when cruelty she tells me is a child’s lips   torn from breast as proof back home the women wear teeth marks

For my mother, Yoshiko Horikoshi Roripaugh 1.X-Ray My mother carried the chest x-ray in her lap on the plane, inside a manila envelope that read Do Not Bend and, garnished with leis at the Honolulu Airport, waited in line—this strange image of ribcage, chain-link vertebrae, pearled milk of lung, and the murky enigmatic chambers of her heart in hand. Until it was her turn and the immigration officer held the black-and-white film up to sun, light pierced clean through her, and she was ushered from one life through the gate of another, wreathed in the dubious and illusory perfume of plucked orchids. 2.Ceramic Pig Newly arrived in New Mexico, stiff and crisp in new dungarees, her honeymoon, they drove into the mountains in a borrowed car, spiraling up and up toward the rumor of deer, into the green tangy turpentine scent of pine, where air crackled with the sizzling collision of bees, furred legs grappling velvet bodies as they mated midair, and where they came upon the disconsolate gaze of a Madonna alcoved against the side of the road, her feet wreathed in candles, fruit, flowers, and other offerings. Nearby, a vendor with a wooden plank balanced between two folding chairs and the glossy row of ceramic pigs lined up across, brilliant glaze shimmering the heat. My mother fell in love with the red- and-blue splash of flowers tattooed into fat flanks and bellies, the green arabesques of stem and leaf circling hoof, snout, and ear.So exotic. Years later she still describes the pig with a sigh—heartbroken, the word she chooses with careful consideration. She’d filled the pig with Kennedy dollars from the grocery budget, each half dollar a small luxury denied at the local Piggly Wiggly, until one day, jingling the shift and clink of the pig’s growing silver weight, she shook too hard, and as if the hoarded wealth of her future were too much to contain, the pig broke open—spilling coins like water, a cold shiny music, into her lap— fragments of bright pottery shards scattering delicate as Easter eggshell. 3.Sneeze My mother sneezes in Japanese.Ké-sho! An exclamation of surprise—two sharp crisp syllables before pulling out the neatly folded and quartered tissue she keeps tucked inside the wrist of her sweater sleeve. Sometimes, when ragweed blooms, I wonder why her sneeze isn’t mine, why something so involuntary, so deeply rooted in the seed of speech, breaks free from my mouth like thistle in a stiff breeze, in a language other than my mother’s tongue. How do you chart the diaspora of a sneeze?I don’t know how you turned out this way

I. Mother (1892-1973) My mother, with a skin of crêpe de Chine, Predominantly yellow-colored, sheer Enough to let the venous blue show through The secondarily bluish carapace, Coughs, rasps, and rattles in her terminal Dream, interrupted by lucidities, When, suctioned out and listening with hard Ears almost waned to stone, she hears me say, “Mother, we’re here. The two of us are here. Anne’s here with me,” and she says, “Anne is so— So pretty,” as if abdicating all Her principalities of prettiness— So noted in her teens, when she smote all Who saw her shake a leg upon the stage Of vaudeville—and sinking into deeps Where ancience lurks, and barebone toothlessness, And bareback exits from the centre ring Of cynosure. Of little, less is left When we leave: a stick figure of a once Quite formidable personage. It is, Therefore, no shock, when next day the call comes From my worn father, followed by the spade Engaged upon hard January earth In Bellevue Cemetery, where he sways And cries for fifty years of joint returns Unjointed, and plucks one carnation from The grave bouquet of springing flowers upon The medium-priced coffin of veneer, To press and keep as a venereal Greenness brought forward from the greying past. II. Father (1895-1974) Whether the rivals for a wife and mother can Compose their differences and timely warp Into concomitant currents, taken by The selfsame tide when taken at the flood— Great waters poured black downhill at the height Of melting in the middle of the night— Is to be seen. We did not find it so. My father, whom I loved as if he’d done All his devoirs (though he had not), and shone Upon my forehead like a morning sun, Came home out of his hospital to stay In our rich, alien house, where trappings tried His niggard monkishness. Four days he stayed In his ashen cocoon; the fifth he died Under my ministrations, his pug jaw Thrust out toward the port of hopelessness, Where he (I hope) received the sirens of All possible welcoming tugs, even as I Felt under his grey, waxen nose for breath And called the doctor to record a death That made shift rather easier for me, Staring at nothing standing out to sea. III. Tras Os Montes (197-) 1. In Company Inspecting their kit and equipment at first light, I am glad the dawn is behind me, so my friends Cannot reflect upon my tears. The province I Move on across the mountains is still night- Bound, deep beneath the reaches of the sun Across the passes; so it will remain All of this long and dusty day, while we— Will, Joe, Bob, Jonathan, Garth, Peter, Paul, Ed, John, Phil, Harry, and a droptic me— March up the sunstruck slopes, dots on the rock That jags two thousand metres high ahead Of us above the passes where the dead Take formal leave of life: a kiss on both Cheeks of the dear departing, medals stripped, With all due ceremony, from his breast, Both epaulets cut loose from their braid stays, His sword, unbroken, pommelled in the hand Of his reliever; lastly, a salute Fired by the arms of officers, the guns Of other ranks, and a flat bugle call Played on a battered Spanish instrument With ragged tassels as the body falls Over the parapet—gaining weightlessness As its flesh deliquesces, as its bones Shiver to ashes—into an air that crawls With all the arts of darkness far below. 2. A Deux A new scenario: on upswept slopes Of ripe green wheat—rare in this country—we Take, linked, a last long walk. In late July, The landscape waits, breath bated, on the whim Of cumulonimbi in the west, which roll In with deceptive stealth, revealing a Black heart cut with a cicatrice of fire, Zigzagging to its ground: a naked peak Kilometres away, a serra out Of mind. I fix your face with a wax smile. Our hands articulate our oneness, soon To dissipate, in a stiff splay of joints. Is all the language at my tongue’s command Too little to announce my stammered thanks For your unquestioning hand at my side, Too much to say I know the lowly deuce Is a poor card to play beside the ace, Black with his curlicues and his strong pulse Of sauve qui peut ambition? Calling a spade A spade, I’m pierced with the extreme regret Of one who dies intestate; as I’m snatched Into the stormcloud from the springing field, From green to black, I spy on you, below, A lone maid in green wheat, and rain farewells And late apologies on your grey head, And thunder sorrows and regrets. The storm Goes east, and the sun picks out my remains Against the cloud: a tentative rainbow, An inverse, weak, and spectral kind of smile. 3. Alone The long march up the fulvous ridgebacks to The marches, the frontiers of difference— Where flesh marches with bone, day marches with His wife the night, and country marches with Another country—is accomplished best, By paradox, alone. A world of twos, Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, of Sound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayed By sole infiltrators who have cast off Their ties to living moorings, and stand out Into the roads of noon approaching night Casting a single shadow, earnest of Their honorable intention to lay down Their lives for their old country, humankind, In the same selfish spirit that inspired Their lifelong journey, largely and at last Alone, across the passes that divide A life from every other, the sheer crags Of overweening will, the deepening scarps Like brain fissures that cunningly cut off Each outcrop from the main and make it one While its luck lasts, while its bravura holds Against all odds, until the final climb Across the mountains to the farther shore Of sundown on the watersheds, where self, Propelled by its last rays, sways in the sway Of the last grasses and falls headlong in The darkness of the dust it is part of Upon the passes where we are no more: Where the recirculating shaft goes home Into the breast that armed it for the air, And, as we must expect, the art that there Turned our lone hand into imperial Rome Reverts to earth and its inveterate love For the inanimate and its return. FINIS

When my mother She who is not All at once Was a young girl Who she was I could see Before the War Waits to be My mother Reading sad books Yet she is In eternity By the river Already I told her Sometimes, she Mother She always Looked up, wisely Whose child Would be But did not dream Though not yet The one The day I would Could not be Whose son Be born to her An other You see

We didn’t know my mother was driving back to her childhood, with a ring of keys, a compass, and a tiger panting in the back seat. Soon enough the tiger was behind the wheel, circling. And each circle spun further and further away from us. When she calls, the tiger has parked the yellow-striped taxi on the highway’s rough shoulder. It’s time, she says, for this dream to be over. Time to go home, sleep in her own bed. If the compass ever worked, she’s forgotten how to read it, and the ring for the keys is broken, the keys melted down for their metal. If I would just call someone and tell him where she is. She has money — she can pay someone to drive her home. If only a road sign were in sight, but no, there’s only scattered chert and farmland and a man across the road who is not my father. Behind the wheel the hungry tiger’s yellow eyes are slightly open. Behind the wheel the tiger snacks on the summer of 1970 and the entire works of Iris Murdoch. Caught in his teeth are recipes for chocolate mousse and coq au vin, my brother’s first arrest, the one- room schoolroom where her mother taught. So who to call? The tiger, sated for the nonce, has started snoring. The quick drive by, today disguised as children. The tiger snores away.

Invoked every sundown, it’s you, painted on clouds rouging our treasured plain and all who walk it, with leaf-fresh kids and women damp from traveling, city-bound, in the radiance of a just-stopped shower; it’s you, mother eternally young, courtesy of death’s plucking hand, rose at the fragrant point of unpetaling, you who are the alpha of every neurosis, every torturing anxiety, and for this I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.