Mother - More poems
This is part of an occasional series in which I write about evenings with my 90 year old mom - during which I often read a few poems aloud and then we do some creative writing exercises. I come up with an idea and she dictates one line or several in response; I write the lines down as quickly as I can :
Friday evening:
After reading her Robert Creeley’s poem, En Famille, and a few poems by Emily Dickinson, I ask her if she would like to make some poems. Her response is interesting:
“I have to ask you permission first.
You read such lovely things.
I don’t want to thrust something at you
That you cannot stand.”
“Of course, Mom. Let’s do some stuff about family.”
I give her a family member, she responds:
Brother
A brother in spirit is always there.
Generally he has something to say
Which is quite all right.
Other times he’s a horse
His feet are big & noisy
There is nothing you can do
To calm him down
Cause there he is
And there he will be
And when he is no longer there
We will feel sad about that, too.
Father
He is better here than gone.
But he’s hard to handle
At any end of the switch:
We would rather he be here
Than he be gone:
And a life without a brother
Is hard to visualize:
I have been thinking about
The brother because he’s closely
Tied to my life
And my father just disappeared
Off the face of the earth
Because he found other places to park
While we were left moaning in the dark.
Mother
Mother is the easiest to get rid of:
You just shove here and push there
And hope someone will be at the other end
To pick up the pieces.
***
We try a few other things, but these pieces formed the strongest core of her work. As usual, when she goes into these dark corners, I find myself overwhelmed with the aggressivness of her honesty - the ‘thrust’ of which she had forewarned me. Between the poems she breaks into weeping. It is as though a geyser has sprung up from a childhood that has lain mute for much of practically a century. She has finally been able to speak from the most primal spaces of her psyche - a childhood divorce in the 1920’s, the death of a brother after World War II. Yet, looking at the poems, so unattached to the specific details of a particular person, it seems the pieces could read for any divorce, any death - they strike me as that primal.
Indeed, if I were to read the work to her next week, she would not recognize or remember herself as the author. Similar as to when she looks at a recent photograph of her face on the coffee table, she will ask, “Does that look like me. Some people say it is me. I don’t think I look that way at all.”
Yet, when I groan slightly as I rise from the chair, she will ask, “Is something wrong with you? Can I help you?” An operative mother again. And, much in the spirit of her poems, after she has lain down to sleep for the night, in assessing what she has experienced this evening, she confides, “I just think you make me feel good and bad - And it’s better to have you than not.”
Such is life with my mom among poems - both hearing and making them.
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