“It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.”
Mother Soul
it is a humbling moment
to hang from a suitcase handle
in an awkward one–arm grip,
my body folded on the rug
like a loose cloth
it’s hard to imagine,
I know,
but this is grief,
that cannot pull forward
or crawl back,
knowing no new powder
or cigarette ash
will dust her room
knowing the pale scent of her
will soon fade
from her pillow,
her gloves,
this earth
Dead
Don’t tell me how to say it.
Passed over, passed on, passed away.
Dead.
That’s how I say it.
After Daddy died, we ate lunch
at the dining room table.
In the mirror above the buffet,
I could see his body draped in white hospice sheets.
I don’t remember what we ate.
Hours later, in the January dark cold,
funeral men arrived to zip him up in the thick, black, plastic bag.
I stopped their zipping when they got to his face.
After Mommy died,
after the nurses had cleaned up the blood
and they’d left us with her for a while,
we stood smoothing her hair, tidying her braid.
I climbed onto the bed and lay down beside her.
Don’t tell me how to say it.
I know what it is.After Westerly
Elm Street, number 9.
The door, a new family green.
Someone else's car
parked in the drive.
The memory of my mother
perches inside on a kitchen stool,
Peter Jennings talking news,
a cocktail on the counter,
dinner on the stove.
My sister and I bounce
down carpeted stairs
to set the table,
light the candles,
pour the milk.
Upstairs, my father
pecks at the typewriter,
a green mug full of coffee cold
standing guard.
At dinner, he builds boats
out of orange rinds and toothpicks,
and sails them across the table.
Most evenings, he walks Riley,
their respite
from a house full of women.
He wears the navy blue trench coat
that I now wear,
so boxy
I can barely reach the bottom of the pockets.
After Westerly;
I think that maybe if I stand outside,
he’ll do so again, passing by
the thirty-four year old me
he’s never seen.
In the city, a photo hangs on my fridge
of my parents laughing at the end of a party,
their arms flung high,
my mother shoeless
in black stocking feet.
