Shunned by her peers, mother was a poet
Who lived in a comic book town,
A social mistake whose only companions
Were the ladies she befriended
At the old folks’ home.
I was her little love letter when I was a child,
My cheeks stamped pink with her smiles,
But I turned against her
When she started picking quarrels with my father.
She wanted to live near a university,
Attend concerts and lectures,
Make new friends, resurrect her muse.
“Not now,” my father replied
Each time she begged him to move.
“Not now, not now,” grindstone words
That chipped away at her heart
Until it vacated the place were their love
Used to be. Then things REALLY got serious,
The unspeakable out there
Volleyed back and forth—followed by
Long broody stretches of silence
And then another round.
I only dated girls when she was out of town.
There were days when bitterness
Coated the lines of the poems she wrote
With its unforgiving glue
The way an oil-slick soils a seagull’s wings,
And the night
My father slammed their bedroom door
And camped out in den
For the next thirty-five years.
“Love’s aftermath,” he said,
A giant absence in his eyes
Each time she begged him for a kiss.
But I also watched him stare at her
The way a climber searches for a path
Long lost beneath the undergrowth.
Once when I came home from college
Drunk as usual, she wanted my love so badly
That she wound time counterclockwise
Until once again I was her little boy,
But the ice cream cone she handed me
Melted many years ago. I could tell you
Some other funny stories about myself
When I was twenty
If they weren’t so sad and inexcusable.
Self-reproach, you ever want me—don’t.
At her funeral it must have been my childhood
Sinking in because I bowed my head
And laced my fingers as if in prayer,
A perfect likeness of contriteness
Because isn’t moonlight a shadow, too?
Then held a conversation with my heart
And almost convinced its network of spies
And secret police
That you can’t fix the past
Unless you fiddle the facts a little.
But I was only talking to myself
So why did I even bother?
Years later when our paths crossed in a dream
More vivid than my waking from it
We behaved badly,
Like villains in a puppet show.
She pretended I was someone she didn’t know
And my lifeless arms hung limp at my sides
Like curtains framing an open window
When the air outside is heavy, humid, still.
Suddenly a tug of tribal remorse
Turned my wrecking yard heart
Into a construction site
And inexorably my arms began to rise
As if borne upward by silver wires
Until they gave her the hug
I had always denied her when she was alive.
Her response was surprise,
A quizzical frown
Bent low beneath the burden of her memories.
“Why now?” she asked,
The accusation in her eyes implacable,
As constant as a cloud of flies.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment