137 Mother poems

I planted an apple tree in memory of my mother, who is not gone, but whose memory has become so transparent that she remembers slicing apples with her grandmother (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than the fruit that I hand her today. Still, she polishes the surface with her thumb, holds it to the light and says with no hesitation,Oh, Yellow Transparent . . . they're so fragile, you can almost see to the core. She no longer remembers how to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants. And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core— to that little cathedral to memory—where the seeds remember everything they need to know to become yellow and transparent.

1 Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph. The sun was shining. The dogs were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping, calm and unmoving as in all photographs. I wiped the dust from my mother’s face. Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood. In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery. The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened. The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew. Summer arrived. The children leaned over the rose border, their shadows merging with the shadows of the roses. A word came into my head, referring to this shifting and changing, these erasures that were now obvious— it appeared, and as quickly vanished. Was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion? Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning, the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna. 2 When I had recovered somewhat from these events, I replaced the photograph as I had found it between the pages of an ancient paperback, many parts of which had been annotated in the margins, sometimes in words but more often in spirited questions and exclamations meaning “I agree” or “I’m unsure, puzzled—” The ink was faded. Here and there I couldn’t tell what thoughts occurred to the reader but through the bruise-like blotches I could sense urgency, as though tears had fallen. I held the book awhile. It was Death in Venice(in translation); I had noted the page in case, as Freud believed, nothing is an accident. Thus the little photograph was buried again, as the past is buried in the future. In the margin there were two words, linked by an arrow: “sterility” and, down the page, “oblivion”— “And it seemed to him the pale and lovely summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned...” 3 How quiet the garden is; no breeze ruffles the Cornelian cherry. Summer has come. How quiet it is now that life has triumphed. The rough pillars of the sycamores support the immobile shelves of the foliage, the lawn beneath lush, iridescent— And in the middle of the sky, the immodest god. Things are, he says. They are, they do not change; response does not change. How hushed it is, the stage as well as the audience; it seems breathing is an intrusion. He must be very close, the grass is shadowless. How quiet it is, how silent, like an afternoon in Pompeii. 4 Beatrice took the children to the park in Cedarhurst. The sun was shining. Airplanes passed back and forth overhead, peaceful because the war was over. It was the world of her imagination: true and false were of no importance. Freshly polished and glittering— that was the world. Dust had not yet erupted on the surface of things. The planes passed back and forth, bound for Rome and Paris—you couldn’t get there unless you flew over the park. Everything must pass through, nothing can stop— The children held hands, leaning to smell the roses. They were five and seven. Infinite, infinite—that was her perception of time. She sat on a bench, somewhat hidden by oak trees. Far away, fear approached and departed; from the train station came the sound it made. The sky was pink and orange, older because the day was over. There was no wind. The summer day cast oak-shaped shadows on the green grass.

In memory of my mother I Speak then. What is it you wanted to say? Was it the way The barge slid down the city river in sunset’s pursuit, Two thirds of June passed, the twenty-second today And summer on tiptoes, in an effort to stretch to the light, How the linden trees breathed through the stifling square And in July there was thundering, mumbling from every direction? But that speech needed gravity, needed some weight at its core And not lightness—that, I’m afraid, was deception. II Can you smell it: how sweet-rotting melon scented the greengrocer’s store Out of sight in the archway the crashing of empty crates On a breeze from the outskirts, the handcars’ jostling call And an archive of leaf-fall covered the pavements’ gray. Let the Rubik’s Cube fall from your hand, it is not worth the strain All effortful planning in vain, take the grapes, eat your fill In the quiet backyard on a bench, see for real, there in the rain What will come to your mind in the hills and the hollows of hell. III And go now, where you were going. But your nights here, in rain Especially in rain, the steady bare branch of the upas tree Learnt to death like the alphabet, feels for the window pane— G for glass, touching the frame, the words you heard at her knee And although I learnt little at school, I see as if it were now Through the flask’s throat and falling from above to beneath With an unforgettable shivering, the fine sand heaping below. The simplest device, but such an opening for grief. IV You’re done for, you deceiver, you cheat, with the tottering Tripod, your cunning replete, beat your rage on the floor like a staff That a stream might come forth, ghostly, transparent and blossoming With the odor of ozone under the municipal office tin roof. The soft furnishings sting you with static—then resound, Speak again, as if under duress, without manifesto or school If these terrible times, this place the Lord has renounced Can fill with such love, the straggler, the spent force that is you. V Aged forty-seven and widowed, Aizenstadt, shuffling, feels His way round the kitchen to the empty medicine chest Is there anything to raise a smile or a glass to here? Not even the comical long johns, in mourning and flapping half-mast. This place, where a good time means down in the yard by the crates Drinking with the men who have seen a good thing or two, Making toasts to Esenin and Chenier as if they were once mates And another wage packet spent like the last one on booze. VI After death I will leave my beloved city and there, without, I will lift my throat to the heavens, my horns tipped back to the earth, And marked by my sorrow I will give forth from my trumpeting mouth To sound through the autumn wastes, the truths for which speech had no words. How the barge was drawn down the river by sunset’s last fingering ray How, on my left wrist, time’s steel cooled and hissed How the magic door was unlocked with an ordinary key Speak. Such misfortune leaves us little else.

for my mother the living 1. After Independence Day all our toys began to tear up, school growing sweet on our tongues. We had already cut & hoed the cotton into rows, weeds piled useless as Confederate bills. September meant picking & half-days at Springfield, us colored grades let off at noon to pick the valuable white till nightfall. My hands, civil & slow, didn’t even deserve my behind on the picking truck, but Unc Chock ran the thing & Mama would’ve killed him dead if he’d dreamt of trying to get salty. The money was bad like all money then, not near as green or wide. Three dollars for a hundred pounds, better part of a day. I barely kept up, hands swole up like unpicked fruit. No matter when she started, Frankie plucked fifteen pounds more, food for two, a new Easter dress. Summers I turned so black & bent, all because I’d rather pick with friends than sling weeds alone, than stuff my mattress green. 2. Winters, when the white king had gone, we slept like fish, still moving. We walked back home for lunch & retraced after school, changing into our other pair of drawers before we chored the stove’s ash. No one got gas till after the War. Each November brought a boxcar from the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe; for a share, Lopez balanced it home on his flatbed, a whale from the hunt. Once full of hobos, that bell we burnt kept us from freezing all season long. Before tossing each board in, I would run my hands across the wood speech of burns, carvings warning Unfriendly Conductor, Town of No Sleep. Leftover wood turned to toys; three boards & somebody’s old rollerskate became a summer scooter. Bored, what was that? We were too busy being poor in that house air-conditioned all winter, too busy sharing everything, even bathwater evenings by the pipe stove. No plumbing, no rats, only mice thick enough to believe we had more than they did.

My mother’s named for places, not Sandusky that has wild hair soliciting the moon like blue-black clouds touring. Not Lorain with ways too benevolent for lay life. Ashtabula comes closer, southern, evangelical and accented, her feet wide as yams. She’s Florida Missouri, a railroad, sturdy boxcars without life of their own, filled and refilled with what no one can carry. You just can’t call somebody Ravenna who’s going to have to wash another woman’s bras and panties, who’s going to wear elbow-length dishwater to formal gigs, who’s going to have to work with her hands, folding and shuffling them in prayer.

The question of my mother is on the table. The dark box of her mind is also there, the garden of everywhere we used to walk together. Among the things the body doesn't know, it is the dark box I return to most: fallopian city engrained in memory, ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum, hinged lid forever bending back and forth — open to me, then closed like the petals of the paperwhite narcissus. What would it take to make a city in me? Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box on the table: Mother, I am out of my mind, spilling everywhere.

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears,— Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,— Take them, and give me my childhood again! I have grown weary of dust and decay,— Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away; Weary of sowing for others to reap;— Rock me to sleep, mother – rock me to sleep! Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue, Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you! Many a summer the grass has grown green, Blossomed and faded, our faces between: Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain, Long I tonight for your presence again. Come from the silence so long and so deep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Over my heart, in the days that are flown, No love like mother-love ever has shone; No other worship abides and endures,— Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours: None like a mother can charm away pain From the sick soul and the world-weary brain. Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold, Fall on your shoulders again as of old; Let it drop over my forehead tonight, Shading my faint eyes away from the light; For with its sunny-edged shadows once more Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore; Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Mother, dear mother, the years have been long Since I last listened your lullaby song: Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem Womanhood’s years have been only a dream. Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace, With your light lashes just sweeping my face, Never hereafter to wake or to weep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!

Dad dead, Mom—back in the bank, tellering— started dressing in cute skirts and pants suits she sewed herself from onionskin patterns and bright-colored knits picked up at Cloth World. Got her dark brunette hair cut in a shag. And she and her single girlfriends from work on a weekday night would leave me to "Love American Style" or Mary Tyler Moore and step out to hear the country house band or now-and-then headliners like Ray Price and Merle Haggard. Mom's blue Buick Wildcat shoulder to shoulder with the other Detroit behemoths in the dim lot around back. Wind skittering trash along the street. Bass notes thumping through the sheet-metal walls and the full swinging sound suddenly blaring when a couple came in or out the door. I know because I'm there, now, in the lot, crouched behind the fender of a Skylark or Riviera, in the weird green glow of the rooftop Ronnie's sign, not keeping tabs on Mom, not watching out, just keeping time with the band and sipping a Slurpee while she dances through this two-year window before getting re-hitched, settling back down. Just twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, looking pretty, having the time of her life.

Mother came to visit today. We hadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’t you call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know, I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside. I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes, rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbing away hours, years. This is what it was like when you were inside me, she said. What? I asked, though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snow melting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window, gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.

can go to Bible study every Sunday and swear she’s still not convinced, but she likes to be around people who are. We have the same conversation every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops to admire the perfect leaves of the Japanese maple she waters in her backyard, or tell her how I can gaze for hours at a desert sky and know this as divine. Nature, she says, doesn’t hold her interest. Not nearly as much as the greens, pinks, and grays of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique Tiffany lamp she finds in San Francisco. She spends hours with her vegetables, tasting the tomatoes she’s picked that morning or checking to see which radishes are big enough to pull. Lately everything she touches bears fruit, from new-green string beans to winning golf strokes, glamorous hats she designs and sews, soaring stocks with their multiplying shares. These are the things she can count in her hands, the tangibles to feed and pass on to daughters and grandchildren who can’t keep up with all the risky numbers she depends on, the blood-sugar counts and daily insulin injections, the monthly tests of precancerous cells in her liver and lungs. She’s a mathematical wonder with so many calculations kept alive in her head, adding and subtracting when everyone else is asleep.