"For Lillian"

That look, yes, that look

            Pierced even the shadows

The child’s sentiment shifted from

            What was to what is

Staring up at—us, our figures

            A frieze of a daggered Greek Chorus

What once made her safe provided

            The alchemy for what stood

The child’s sentiment shifted from

            What was to what is

And we bickered and fakely bantered,

            (For her sake).

What once made her safe provided

            The alchemy for what stood

And she drew the blanket and the animals,

            A talisman around her unlined neck,

We bickered and fakely bantered,

            (For her sake).

Yes, I broke the “Golden Rule”—I

            Cursed her mother and made fodder of my words

She drew the blanket and the animals,

            A talisman around her unlined neck,

And we left that room together, though

            We could still hear her cries, muffled, through the plastered wall.

"A Moment Still Folded"

The vinyl creases of the booth resembled the lines in my grandmother’s palm. Her wrinkle’s deep, free rivers winding and burrowing their way from the droop of her ears to her once prominent but now weathered chin to the rounded edges of her mouth to the cliffs of her forward brow.  A history.  Our history. Those wrinkles bore our history, told of comedies and tragedies, of births and deaths, of hits and hits harder.  A history hid itself between each crevice of those wrinkles that were once smooth, that shone and felt of marble in her twenties and thirties, now lay themselves as witnesses and storytellers between the two coffee cups.  Who are the witnesses?  Who tells the story?  Two children and two husbands dead. A crippled daughter in crippled marriage.  The ashtrays at Smitty’s Café had not been emptied from the night’s last shift. The smell of bacon and old cigarettes wrestled with a honeyed Sarah Vaughn’s “September Song” on the local station. 

He imagined that the ninety-first birthday left little to be desired but he made his way north for her party.  Simple.  A dinner and a cake.  But something had been forgotten.  A trip to the IGA for the candles and she insisted she go with him.  They lopped down the walk toward the store where his brother broke his ankle after a hard shove. He turned back to look through the large picture window of the tiny ranch house.  The old television antenna they climbed to conquer the roof and the neighborhood, its masthead sacrificed to cable, loomed still. The cherry tree had long ago died and the brick façade yielded to an inch of space between the house and its own weight.  She had kept up the perennials—lavender and yarrow, day lilies and columbine—and the annuals—black-eyed susan and impatiens, petunias and marigolds—but they had long ago given way to a plain of dandelions. No doubt a decline of spirit, a shift in philosophy about her beginning and her end. The robust rose bushes that once peaked against the side of the house were thorny stumps that resembled the upturned hand of a skeleton. The broad and majestic silver maples along the rough-hewn berm had long been removed to make way for the garish though neat cement curbs.  The shade had provided respite from the sun and the sun provided too much.

They left the IGA holding hands.  She had gripped his hand too tightly as a child on the night walks they had taken and that had not changed now.  Snatching him back from the curb and from a noise.  Safe.  Older, he had laughed about it.  Just beyond the IGA was Smitty’s Café.  Looking at the café front she inhaled deeply and stopped.  This café dredged arthritic memories from every part of her body. It was here that she sat some sixty years ago.  They entered and sat.  Smitty’s had witnessed and told its own history. Proposals and rejections.  Hellos and goodbyes. Smitty’s had forced the hands of management and unions over banana cream pie and had softened the break up of the “Marys and Tommys” of the town. It had overheard truths and half-truths that could never be uttered.  A blind but eager listener.  Smitty’s had become a kind of secular confessional.

1971.  She and Neal had sat with their only daughter. They offered her an envelope of cash and papers to sign. Her son had lost his life, the lake taking every last one of those daring and beautiful twenty-one years. And she had already lost one child at birth.  Her body throbbed for another child, her daughter’s child. How dare her daughter fashion herself a mother.  She at the County Beauty Academy still wanting to be a girl, still wanting the independence that being eighteen gave her.  The baby’s father a shoeless loser. They both prodded and they both jabbed. Please say yes with our eyes open she thought. (Please say yes with our eyes closed.)  Her daughter answered. 

2007.  She wanted this admission to be her final confession and sought a reprieve from the boy—the man—that sat in front of her.  And the moment had arrived. The moment of truth she sought. The moment of release and reverence for a misinterpreted history.  The blinds were half open.  The coffee cooled.  The moment passed and folded.  She smiled.  He smiled.  She took his hand and squeezed.  Safe.

             

[Untitled]

My heart is pressed 2x4s

                  Did you not marry me for love? (Of course…)

Sandpapered rough on its edge

And in its right angles;

I smell the burnt etching of your engraving, hot

On my fine grain.

Mary stood at the Bridgestone Barn, its

Ancient ballasts at ground level, supporting heavy, knotted

Arches with an unfilled space between. Did I say

Pressed? Not pressed, but hidden,

an obvious gift.

Words like “cool” or “whatever” don’t apply

Here; unserious words for our serious work.

Some say love is a first-sight; but yours happened

Last (sight), an after thought…

How do you understand a love, an

abstract that we try to mold and frame;

A bold tangent crooked in its space, intersecting

where it shouldn’t.  Rough edges unplaned.

*******

He set the Bridgestone Barn ablaze at its moorings,

the old pine in resin shadows, the limestone laughing.

Jacob hoisted the ladder to the famed loft and climbed, and he

Sat waiting for burnt dust of the hay, the scent

Knowing its direction, up and through and over.

Will you burn like the stone and timber and the ash? Will you burn

                  like I burn, a far and a deep smoldering?

You will watch a black plume rise; you will taste its toxic flesh

From a mile away or two or never.

The barn, a laughing phantom, a pantomime of time.  

It screams out in its own derisive misery,

To at last laugh at our own failed history.

A Home

There was a time that I felt as if I would never leave home. The farthest I had been was to the downtown shopping center. The bakery, the bank, and the bars. And the clothing and shoe shops the salons and the courthouse with a bronze statue pointing skyward at salvation, a salutary boast for our town. Boys and girls running and riding passed fast, and I lumbered even then on thick though movable legs that bore my weight. But I smiled too. I met one of those boys some time later, a year younger though in the same grade and from a different town. He was riding in a car with my friend Sue. He had the blondest hair that shone silver in the sun at the right angle. I was reticent and taciturn toward his slight posturing and his need to shyly rub his shoulder against mine. He pretended not to notice and I pretended harder not to like him. We later traveled west and south and finally home again because of a protesting mother and a protective father. I remember thinking I was sure they wouldn’t like him because of the black eye he wore and the shoes that he didn’t. Or it could have been that he stole a kiss at the window that I sit at now and watch the flowers bloom and the sun shine and the leaves fall and the snow drift, an end that begins and a beginning that does not ever cease. A zero becomes a zero, a one a one and the numbers in between never fail to show their buxom curves and their constricted lines in black and white.  Outside of my life things molted and shed due their course but here things paced like molasses: time, people, my thoughts, the things I love and the things I don’t or stopped loving. Time doesn’t seem to change. People do not see to change. A home only changes for those that belong in its fragile frame.

She leaned forward and looked with care at the sill and the frame of the window. The mark from the rust-speckled pocketknife still flashed its sentiment under layers of white and yellow and sky blue against what was now. “KR+ DJ.” In all of that time she would have had cut her bones out of her skin to leave she couldn’t or wouldn’t. She was back where she was born. Familiar faces make a home and a job at the grocery and a note begging to stay. A room that was your room as a child holds fast to fond farewells and hellos.  For her familiarity does not comfort nor do ancient hieroglyphs carved in a 50-year-old window frame. There was always a hope that they could have made a home in a place as unfamiliar as they were to each other now. That silly saying of “Home is Where the Heart Is” is only true for those that still have hearts she thought. 

My 60th Autumn

I saw a boy raking leaves today. He was outside my window in the next yard raking the silver maple and the elm and the pine needles pushed themselves up against the straight and bent metal of the rake tearing the brittled, mottled leaves. I watched him there a long time. Once he looked up and saw me watching him. The boy waved and I waved back but I don’t think he could tell.  The wind nestled itself against the house, pushed and pulled the leaves from the tidy piles the boy raked. I tried to open the window with my right arm to smell the damp and dead summer but I couldn’t do it. I tried to move my chair closer to the wall but the length of the chrome arm kept me from the leverage I needed. I called to my husband. He was in the kitchen I think because he didn’t respond. I tried the window again and it gave just enough. My long unused aluminum cane was in arm’s reach.  I wedged the rubbered end of it between the sill and the bottom of the window. I pushed down and the 45-degree angle eased the window up and open.  My nostrils pulsed. I breathed long and deep.

I wondered what the boy would think if he could see through the wall.  If he wondered why I didn’t rake my own leaves. If he wondered why he rarely saw me except through my window. He would walk and run and skip and jump up the back walkway Monday through Friday after school ended. A polite boy. A caring boy. He always waved and I did too. My eyesight hadn’t failed and I could always see him glance to the left at the wooden planks that anchored themselves at varying angles up to the back door.  A child would fancy a sleek chromed chair with two large wheels on either side, a thing for adventure, for daring. I imagined he saw himself racing in my chair down the two-tired ramp a smile crowing his achievement, an imaginary trophy in his empty hand.  Aren’t all achievements forgotten? Don’t we just relish those that happen in the moment? An ephemeral victory.  The boy couldn’t know and will never know my achievement was opening my window today.

I closed my eyes and could still see his small frame moving like a miniature grandfather clock. How did God figure into making things move? The boy, the leaves, the air we breathe? The muscle to move the rake, the smile that begged for something, a hand thrust upward moving back and forth, back and forth… An ache in the throat, a tear in the ear, a sound through an empty house to an empty kitchen. He made these things move and he made things unmovable. Legs. Arms. Hearts. Movement is sacred, and I have sinned.

Birds

I have a picture of my parents when they were nineteen.  They’ve migrated a great distance since that has grounded them.  

My mom’s ankles were as large as small tree trunks.  And as immobile.  My dad pushed her around the small patio that acted as their only thruway to the outside world spring through autumn.  They were a spectacle as curtains moved in each window that faced them.  Sometimes one of my mom’s feet would ride underneath the toe plate, scraping the walkway.  She didn’t know it because she couldn’t feel it.  It was only after feeling as if the chair was skidding on a caught stick or rock that my dad paused and readjusted her toe-worn shoe.  I looked at anything that drew my attention from it.  I listened for anything that would block the biting drag of her shoe.  It reminded me of gnashing teeth.  Riding in the county van for those with disabilities wasn’t an option considering the jolting, and my parent’s hoist-less vehicle provided no respite.  Even if they had had a hoist, she dreamt herself in small crane, it moving a body that wanted to move but cemented itself from the embarrassment and the disease.  How dare these metallic wheels imagine themselves as her legs on occasion.  

Inside was a small apartment meant for the old and infirmed, for those that had perhaps lost touch with the physicality of life, with the beautiful things that life can bear.  My sister was visiting that day too with my twin nieces, one of few memories I have left of all of us together. 

My mother suffered a fall about five years ago.  Long-suffering from degenerative disc disease before the fall, although capable in many ways.  Her broken arm complicated the already complex routine that my dad and she followed.  My dad was forced to quit work and care for my mother every minute of every hour of every day.  I’m still angry with them for their lack of foresight about their lives.

Five years later, they are worse for wear and no closer to a life in which they used to play and pretend.  My mom is at once lethargic and lucid, aware and atrophied.  She has since lost her tree trunk-like ankles and has replaced them with twigs.  Her slippers look like two weighty perched birds.  I spoke with my dad the other day.  He told me in a quiet way that he was having some problems of his own.  He mentioned that he wished the same thing for himself as he wished for my mother.  I chose not to read into that.  It’s the time between yesterday and today that crushes them in such an absolute way.  I try to drive north to see them and bring my own family.  It’s an intimate thing to be touched and to lose that sense over and over.  To be noticed and talked about again. 

They are a beautiful half of a whole that diminishes with time.  I look at them and wonder.   I wonder how their intimacy forges and re-forges itself each day, my dad’s devotion branded and seared by moving my mother from her bed to her chair and back.  I wait for the day that a stranger calls to tell me they have both finally flown away.

Flying

The sheets wrinkled against her skin.   She tried to flatten them out with her right hand but realized the paperweight deadness of her left arm was stuck against the sheet and the bed and her progress.  The boots that the nurse had velcroed around her feet reminded her of some futuristic rocket boot though she knew she would hardly move again.  She had drop foot and looked like an injured pigeon laying flat on its gray feathered back.  The boots only reminded her of what she could not do.  Only in her mind.  She pinched her eyes and reopened them.  She looked out the window at the rose bush and the peonies, the lamb's ear and the columbine.  She saw herself flying high and low and high again.  If the choice was offered she would choose to remain flat on her back in her rocket boots flying through the sky but not too high and not too low for eternity instead of stagnant and low to her bed. The air and sun breathing life into a lifeless form revealing a smile long gone.  She would fly where she used to play and run and swim and hide.  The space between her now cold bed and the warm sun excited her to a place that had died when she realized she would never walk again.  She circled and did figure-eights over her elementary school.  She moved so close to the rusty merry-go-round that it moved with the force of her flight but only slightly.  She flew face down through the swings swinging them to and fro and she flew through again face up to the sky.  She flew the length of the slide five whole times almost touching the rough pavement.    She played hopscotch between its faded form and four square and funnel-ball.  She imagined herself playing kickball kicking a home run and flew the length of the bases cork-screwing her way to home plate.  She took a last look and flew away.


The rip of the velcro ended her flight and she fell back to the ground back to the bed where she felt the weight of what had been what was and what will be.  Her feet both turned inward making a triangle of bone and flesh that heeded her command no longer.  While her husband was charged with removing the boots she never turned from the windows and her reimagined life.


If presented with the option of losing everyone from her husband to her sons and daughter to her seven grandchildren and the days of birth and the days of death or walk again independent and free from medical tape and drugs and dependence on someone who needed someone to depend on she would choose the latter.  It would be bittersweet and selfish but now she only felt bitter.  The choice she offered herself in her mind didn't allow for her to forget her memories or their faces.  But the pain of remembering a life once loved and hated with her family compared nothing to laying immobile and only looking up and side-to-side.  The absolute layers of swelling lassitude and desolation that she was born in day after day.  To finally leave that wretched place at the expense of her family lent itself to a kind of sweetness that she so longed for but knew deep in her soul she would never taste again.  At least she could walk with a smile on her face instead of laying flat and faking an old life.  Where the power comes from to fool oneself day after day?