137 Mother poems

the children of haiti are not mythological we are starving or eating salty cakes made of clay because in 1804 we felled our former slave captors the graceless losers sunk vindictive yellow teeth into our forests what was green is now dust and everyone knows trees unleash oxygen (another humble word for life) they took off with our torn branches beheaded our future stuck our breath up on pikes for all the world to see we are a living dead example of what happens to warriors who in lieu of fighting for white men's countries dare to fight for their own lives during carnival we could care less about our bloated empty bellies where there are voices we are dancing where there is vodou we are horses where there are drums we are possessed with joy and stubborn jamboree but when the makeshift trumpet player runs out of rhythmic breath the only sound left is guts grumbling and we sigh to remember that food and freedom are not free is haiti really free if our babies die starving? if we cannot write our names read our rights keep our leaders in their seats? can we be free? really? if our mothers are mud? if dead columbus keeps cursing us and nothing changes when we curse back we are a proud resilient people though we return to dust daily salt gray clay with hot black tears savor snot cakes over suicide we are hungry creative people sip bits of laughter when we are thirsty dance despite this asthma called debt congesting legendarily liberated lungs

She said the cornflake cake made her day, she said a man cannot be blamed for being unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his extremities and it’s just the way his body chemistry is. She said all sorts of things. We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw the walled garden and the old-fashioned library in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves with the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellow crocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree, the sky showing in purple triangles between the branches. We looked in the window of Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful, all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun was pushing through the iced air and landing on us on our heads and our shoulders and the backs of our legs. We bought nail varnish remover from Wilko’s, a bath sheet, and two Diet Cokes. She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God because she didn’t want to go to hell, although, she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell already, haven’t we. She said a woman should know her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.

In the evenings of my childhood, when I went to bed, music washed into the cove of my room, my door open to a slice of light. I felt a melancholy I couldn't have named, a longing for what I couldn't yet have said or understood but still knew was longing, knew was sadness untouched by time. Sometimes the music was a rippling stream of clear water rushing over a bed of river stones caught in sunlight. And many nights I crept from bed to watch her swaying where she sat overtaken by the tide, her arms rowing the music out of the piano.

In her last notes, when her hand began to tremble, my mother tried to teach it the penmanship she was known for, how to make the slanted stems of the p's and d's, the descending roundness of the capital m's, the long loops of the f's crossed at the center, sending it back again and again until each message was the same: a record of her insistence that the hand return her to the way she was before, and of all the ways the hand had disobeyed.

One boyfriend said to keep the bullets locked in a different room. Another urged clean it or it could explode. Larry thought I should keep it loaded under my bed,

We walked five blocks to the elementary school, my mother’s high heels crunching through playground gravel. We entered through a side door. Down the long corridor, decorated with Halloween masks, health department safety posters— we followed the arrows to the third grade classroom. My mother stepped alone into the booth, pulling the curtain behind her. I could see only the backs of her calves in crinkled nylons. A partial vanishing, then reappearing pocketbook crooked on her elbow, our mayor’s button pinned to her lapel. Even then I could see—to choose is to follow what has already been decided. We marched back out finding a new way back down streets named for flowers and accomplished men. I said their names out loud, as we found our way home, to the cramped house, the devoted porch light left on, the customary meatloaf. I remember, in the classroom converted into a voting place— there were two mothers, conversing, squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

—Faulkner My mother is a fish and the sky is low and orange, and the long grass rises in the still air. The mud is black and worms turn their cold segments at my feet. I used to walk with an old lady. It seemed far from water and the ground sank. Weeds were higher than my head. Slugs slept in the mud. My mother is a fish and the sky swallows my head. A fine rain comes and softens the ferns. In March before the crocus and the lily, eggs bunch in the shoal of green jelly. Crabs glide through them. A kingfisher is dead on a rock. My mother is an eel winding a light around the rock. Even without a moon the black glows. * The sun grows like an egg over the bridge, the first birds are silver and swoop down for my mother. When the lady came we jumped— She took us to find worms we could squeeze in our hands. I went with my father to the dark water. I went with a bucket of mud. When we doubled the worm on the hook and it coiled, I could hear how a bass could thud. I grabbed it with a wet hand, and watched its eye go black as I dropped it in a metal bucket. Hack it along the gill and throw the head to the gulls.

1. The dark socket of the year the pit, the cave where the sun lies down and threatens never to rise, when despair descends softly as the snow covering all paths and choking roads: then hawkfaced pain seized you threw you so you fell with a sharp cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk. My father heard the crash but paid no mind, napping after lunch yet fifteen hundred miles north I heard and dropped a dish. Your pain sunk talons in my skull and crouched there cawing, heavy as a great vessel filled with water, oil or blood, till suddenly next day the weight lifted and I knew your mind had guttered out like the Chanukah candles that burn so fast, weeping veils of wax down the chanukiya. Those candles were laid out, friends invited, ingredients bought for latkes and apple pancakes, that holiday for liberation and the winter solstice when tops turn like little planets. Shall you have all or nothing take half or pass by untouched? Nothing you got,Nun said the dreydl as the room stopped spinning. The angel folded you up like laundry your body thin as an empty dress. Your clothes were curtains hanging on the window of what had been your flesh and now was glass. Outside in Florida shopping plazas loudspeakers blared Christmas carols and palm trees were decked with blinking lights. Except by the tourist hotels, the beaches were empty. Pelicans with pregnant pouches flapped overhead like pterodactyls. In my mind I felt you die. First the pain lifted and then you flickered and went out. 2. I walk through the rooms of memory. Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths, every chair ghostly and muted. Other times memory lights up from within bustling scenes acted just the other side of a scrim through which surely I could reach my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain of time which is and isn’t and will be the stuff of which we’re made and unmade. In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen your first nasty marriage just annulled, thin from your abortion, clutching a book against your cheek and trying to look older, trying to look middle class, trying for a job at Wanamaker’s, dressing for parties in cast off stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes were hazy with dreams. You did not notice me waving as you wandered past and I saw your slip was showing. You stood still while I fixed your clothes, as if I were your mother. Remember me combing your springy black hair, ringlets that seemed metallic, glittering; remember me dressing you, my seventy year old mother who was my last dollbaby, giving you too late what your youth had wanted. 3. What is this mask of skin we wear, what is this dress of flesh, this coat of few colors and little hair? This voluptuous seething heap of desires and fears, squeaking mice turned up in a steaming haystack with their babies? This coat has been handed down, an heirloom this coat of black hair and ample flesh, this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin. This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks they provided cushioning for my grandmother Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me and we all sat on them in turn, those major muscles on which we walk and walk and walk over the earth in search of peace and plenty. My mother is my mirror and I am hers. What do we see? Our face grown young again, our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant. Our arms quivering with fat, eyes set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy, our belly seamed with childbearing, Give me your dress that I might try it on. Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat. I will not fit you mother. I will not be the bride you can dress, the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew, a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth. You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound. Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks barbed and drawing blood with their caress. My twin, my sister, my lost love, I carry you in me like an embryo as once you carried me. 4. What is it we turn from, what is it we fear? Did I truly think you could put me back inside? Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten furnace and be recast, that I would become you? What did you fear in me, the child who wore your hair, the woman who let that black hair grow long as a banner of darkness, when you a proper flapper wore yours cropped? You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough. Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat. Secretly the bones formed in the bread. I became willful, private as a cat. You never knew what alleys I had wandered. You called me bad and I posed like a gutter queen in a dress sewn of knives. All I feared was being stuck in a box with a lid. A good woman appeared to me indistinguishable from a dead one except that she worked all the time. Your payday never came. Your dreams ran with bright colors like Mexican cottons that bled onto the drab sheets of the day and would not bleach with scrubbing. My dear, what you said was one thing but what you sang was another, sweetly subversive and dark as blackberries and I became the daughter of your dream. This body is your body, ashes now and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts, my throat, my thighs. You run in me a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood, you sing in my mind like wine. What you did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

My mother’s God has written the best of the protestant proverbs: you make the bed you lie in it; God helps him who helps himself. He tends to shy away from churches, is more to be found in phone calls to daughters or rain clouds over rusty grass. The Catholics have got him wrong entirely: too much waving the arms about, the incense and caftan, that rainbow light. He’s leaner than that, lean as a pair of grocer’s scales, hard as a hammer at cattle sales the third and final time of asking. His face is most clear in a scrubbed wooden table or deep in the shine of a laminex bench. He’s also observed at weddings and funerals by strict invitation, not knowing quite which side to sit on. His second book, my mother says, is often now too well received; the first is where the centre is, tooth for claw and eye for tooth whoever tried the other cheek? Well, Christ maybe, but that’s another story. God, like her, by dint of coursework has a further degree in predestination. Immortal, omniscient, no doubt of that, he nevertheless keeps regular hours and wipes his feet clean on the mat, is not to be seen at three in the morning. His portrait done in a vigorous charcoal is fixed on the inner curve of her forehead. Omnipotent there in broad black strokes he does not move. It is not easy, she’d confess, to be my mother’s God.

She kept them high on the top shelf, In boxes big as drums— Bright, crescent-shaped boats With little fishnets dangling down— And wore them with her best dress To teas, coffee parties, department stores. What a lovely catch, my father used to say, Watching her sail off into the afternoon waters.