If you want to know a woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully . . . The more a daughter knows the details of her mother’s life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter.
Browsing category: Relationship
Our mutual refusal …
Our mutual refusal to show our true selves, good and bad, to each other does not allow either woman to explore her separate life, her own identity.
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
At the Terminal
Remember how we took those separate flights
imagining the worst: our plane gone down,
our children young, alone? I’d leave an hour
before you, wait to meet you at your gate,
or you’d go first, arrive and rent a car,
then meet me at the exit. In between,
blue emptiness, our lives suspended where
clouds stacked themselves between us: you on earth
and I already gone. Or else I’d stand
on solid ground and watch you disappear—
my heart, my shining bird!—a streak of light,
a flash of wing, then nothing. Only one
of us, one at a time. And whether I turned
back to the concourse or pulled down the shade
over the brilliant window, belted in
above the tilting tarmac, I rehearsed
this hour, ever nearer, when the planet
would hold one or the other, and you’d watch—
or I—the earth receding, or look up
into the arc of absence, blinding space.
The Merger
for my son
Trying to think of something useful
To say about marriage, I remember
A morning when I was twenty-plus,
Self-absorbed in my tinny pink
Renault Dauphine, my Little Toot,
And I tried to get by a tank-truck on
A bendy road too briefly straight.
Shuddering, pedal floored, my frivolous
Vessel leveled with the cab
Like a pilot fish by a shark’s grim grille.
Then there was a car ahead of us
And, as I tried to floor a pedal
Already on the floor, the blue
Of ice I hadn’t seen. Spinning
Toward the implacable hugeness of the cab, looking up
Into the eyes of the truckdriver, I felt
Only the sweet certainty of
Submission, call it love, as if
Already I had left myself and could look
Down with the driver’s godlike and loving
Eyes at a comical pink Dauphine
Sliding backwards down the road, then spinning
Again and into a snowbank, tilted
Against a tree. One flat tire
And a dent in the roof I pushed out myself.
I made it to work on time. Because
The truckdriver had seen the oncoming car
Before I had, had seen the patch of blue
And had slowed to let me by, I met
And married your mother, and you were born
And have grown up to meet and marry, and I
Have begun to understand the blind
Release of self to the will of another
And the answering wise, dispassionate
Restraint of the merger we call marriage.
That New
At the market today, I look for Piñata
apples, their soft-blush-yellow. My husband
brought them home last week, made me guess at
the name of this new strain, held one in his hand
like a gift and laughed as I tried all
the names I knew: Gala, Fuji, Honey
Crisp—watched his face for clues—what to call
something new? It's winter, only tawny
hues and frozen ground, but that apple bride
was sweet, and I want to bring it back to him,
that new. When he cut it, the star inside
held seeds of other stars, the way within
a life are all the lives you might live,
each unnamed, until you name it.
Lily
No one would take her when Ruth passed.
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, "She's old. Somebody
should put her down."
I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her
about the fish who died for her, the ones
in the cheerful aluminum cans.
She lies on my chest to sleep, rising
and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat
fastened to a battered dock by a string.
Ode to Broken Things
Things get broken
at home
like they were pushed
by an invisible, deliberate smasher.
It's not my hands
or yours
It wasn't the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
It wasn't anything or anybody
It wasn't the wind
It wasn't the orange-colored noontime
Or night over the earth
It wasn't even the nose or the elbow
Or the hips getting bigger
or the ankle
or the air.
The plate broke, the lamp fell
All the flower pots tumbled over
one by one. That pot
which overflowed with scarlet
in the middle of October,
it got tired from all the violets
and another empty one
rolled round and round and round
all through winter
until it was only the powder
of a flowerpot,
a broken memory, shining dust.
And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread of our weeks,
which released
one by one, so many hours
for honey and silence
for so many births and jobs,
that clock also
fell
and its delicate blue guts
vibrated
among the broken glass
its wide heart
unsprung.
Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
breaking down
forms
and what lasts through time
is like an island on a ship in the sea,
perishable
surrounded by dangerous fragility
by merciless waters and threats.
Let's put all our treasures together
-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold --
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
So many useless things
which nobody broke
but which got broken anyway
To One Now Grown
If we could start over, I would let you get dirtier.
Place your face in the food, it’s okay.
In trade for great metaphor,
the ones you used to spout every minutes,
I’d extend your bedtime,
be more patient with tantrums,
never answer urgency with urgency,
try to stay serene.
In one scene, you are screaming.
And I stop the car.
What do we do next?
I can’t remember.
It’s buried in the drawer of small socks.
Give me the box of time.
Let’s make it bigger.
It’s all yours.
The Couple
They no longer sleep quite as well as they did
when they were younger. He lies awake thinking
of things that happened years ago, turning
uncomfortably from time to time, pulling on the
blankets. She worries about money. First one
and then the other is awake during the night,
in shifts as if keeping watch, though they can’t
see very much in the dark and it’s quiet. They
are sentries at some outpost, an abandoned fort
somewhere in the middle of the Great Plains
where only the wind is a regular visitor. Each
stands guard in the wilderness of an imagined
life in which the other sleeps untroubled.
Recognitions
The awful imbalance that occurs with age
when you suddenly see that more friends
have died, than remain alive. And at times
their memory seems so real that the latest
realization of a death can become a second,
smaller death. All those talks cut off in midsentence.
All those plans tossed in the trash.
What can you do but sit out on the porch
when evening comes? The day’s last light
reddens the leaves of the copper beach.
Prague
The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?
Maybe a hundred years, which would
give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo
and take the train to Vladivostok,
learn German to read Thomas Mann
in the original. Even more baseball games,
more days at the beach and the baking
of more walnut cakes for family birthdays.
How much time is enough time? How much
is needed for all those unspent kisses,
those slow walks along cobbled streets?
November, 1967
Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount
Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon,
we went into Russia,
and when we came out, the snow
was falling—the same snow
that fell in Moscow.
The sky had turned black velvet.
We'd been through the Revolution
and the frozen winters.
In the Chevy, we waited for the heater
to melt ice on the windshield,
clapping our hands to keep warm.
On the highway, these two things:
a song from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and that semi-truck careening by.
Now I travel through the dark without you
and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful
the way you were, no matter what.
Delivered
She lived there for years in a
small space in a high rise that saw
her winter years dawn. When the past
became larger than her present,
she would call and thank us for cards
we gave her when we were small;
for Christmas, Mother's Day, her birthday,
our devotion scrawled amidst depictions
of crooked hearts and lopsided lilies.
She would write out new ones,
and we found them everywhere—unsent;
in perfect cursive she wished us joy,
chains of x's and o's circling her signature.
And when her time alone was over,
the space emptied of all but sunshine, dust,
and a cross nailed above her door,
those cards held for us a bitter peace;
they had finally been delivered.
Coffee in the Afternoon
It was afternoon tea, with tea foods spread out
Like in the books, except that it was coffee.
She made a tin pot of cowboy coffee, from memory,
That's what we used to call it, she said, cowboy coffee.
The grounds she pinched up in her hands, not a spoon,
And the fire on the stove she made from a match.
I sat with her and talked, but the talk was like the tea food,
A little of this and something from the other plate as well,
Always with a napkin and a thank-you. We sat and visited
And I watched her smoke cigarettes
Until the afternoon light was funny in the room,
And then we said our good-byes. The visit was liniment,
The way the tea was coffee, a confusion plain and nice,
A balm for the nerves of two people living in the world,
A balm in the tenor of its language, which spoke through our hands
In the small lifting of our cups and our cakes to our lips.
It was simplicity, and held only what it needed.
It was a gentle visit, and I did not see her again.
Chores
All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust
out of the trailer truck into the chute.
From time to time he’s clambered down to even
the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust.
Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.
I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff
he says, stripping nude in the late September sun
while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked
with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks.
I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn
no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses
burst through when snow avalanches off the roof.
Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his,
horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces.
Fifty years married, he’s safely facetious.
No garden pump that’s airbound, no window a grouse
flies into and shatters, no ancient tractor’s
intractable problem with carburetor
ignition or piston, no mowers and no chain saws
that refuse to start, or start, misfire and quit.
But after a Bloody Mary on the terrace
already frost-heaved despite our heroic efforts
to level the bricks a few years back, he says
let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset
and off we go, a couple of aging fools.
I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot
less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.
Baptism
I help my father
into the shower
with his good hand
he grips my arm for support.
Inside he sits like Buddha
on a plastic stool
and waits for me
to begin.
I drench him
with warm water,
soap his head, his back,
the flabby stomach,
the private parts
private no more.
I had not before seen my father's
nakedness, nor the changing
contour of his being,
his growing helplessness.
His brown skin glistens
and I think of him
as a young man on the night
of my conception:
Panting, capable, shining
with sweat and definition,
the soft hands of my mother
grasping his shoulders.
I pat him dry,
he lets me dress him
in the white
hospital clothes,
oil his hair,
put him to bed
and forgive him.
Album
The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my
childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get
blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking
me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my
head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised).
I’m starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder
than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is
tragic or sad. Isn’t it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn’t
it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting
not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were
saying, “I’ve had enough,” ready to go somewhere else and form a new
configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them.
They treat us like dirt.
January
“Cold as the moon,” he’d mutter
In the January of 5 A.M. and 15 below
As he tried to tease the old Chev into greeting
One more misanthropic morning.
It was an art (though he never
Used that curious word) as he thumped
The gas pedal and turned the key
So carefully while he held his breath
And waited for the sharp jounce
And roar of an engaged engine.
“Shoulda brought in the battery last night.”
“Shoulda got up around midnight
And turned it over once.”
It was always early rising as he’d worked
A lifetime “in every damn sort
Of damn factory.” Machines were
As natural to him as dogs and flowers.
A machine, as he put it, "was sensible.”
I was so stupid about valves and intakes
He thought I was some religious type.
How had I lived as long as I had
And remained so out of it?
And why had I moved of my own free will
To a place that prided itself
On the blunt misery of January?
“No way to live,” he’d say as he poked
A finger into the frozen throat
Of an unwilling carburetor.
His breath hung in the air
Like a white balloon.
Later on the way to the town where
We worked while the heater
Wheezed fitfully and the windshield
Showed indifference to the defroster
He’d tum to me and say that
The two best things in this world
Were hot coffee and winter sunrises.
The icy road beckoned to no one,
Snow began to drift down sleepily,
The peace of servitude sighed and dreamed.
i am running into a new year
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me