* * * * * * * * *
Grandma was poor. Not thrift-town bound or
do-it-yourself credit strapped but
one pot of stew a day, no
no hot water poor. Later there was heat but
there never was a doctor or a car.
She once hitchhiked twelve hundred miles to reach
a son in trouble. The warden sent him home with her:
"Such a mother, he can't be all that bad."
Not all but bad; he stole again and she
wrote letters to him in the pen: "I know you didn't
do it, Son." The warden censored them--
can't you see, Grandma, he had to censor them--
how I yearn now, looking back, to make her see.
But she did not need me. There were books
floor to ceiling and a big, uncurtained window
looking into a narrow orchard. Thirty astonished years
of sleeping late in the deep-pillowed bed beneath
three walls of books and the big, uncurtained
window.
And never were there not flowers. "If I couldn't have
nice things I could always afford seeds." That was what she
left to me: the drive to dirt, to earthworms,
furrows, flowers, wind--the hurting for trees,
for unveiled windows looking into space.
Yours was the old school: you wore
brooches and black or, feeling gay,
as here, navy with a thin white tie.
I thought you were prim as afternoon
tea with my mother at your house.
Then what took you so far north
to where it was always midnight? And
why is your hair so daringly cropped,
your arm fully around me? I think
you were more than these thin lips suggest,
may even have guessed at stunned childhood,
how dark the midnights are.
About her is the lakeland, the runestone found and kept:
oaks grow thick as water, as lentils in open fields.
Her father drank away all but this one acre, hers:
she refuses to leave it, not for shopping, Sunday meeting, birth.
Her passion is silver tyranny over the husband.
He'd walked ten miles to meet her at a dance.
She, already a woman, was quick to laugh;
he a boy meant only to take her home.
But home was a rundown shack where
her laughter belittled the empty shelves; home
was motherless siblings, one little sister remembered,
dead from bad berries, under the lilac bush.
It touched him; he was caught.
Their first child came early, with many more and many
carried wrong. She sang it out in bawdy songs.
Plumbing was slow to reach them and the children slept
boys and girls together under agency coats; one
'woke screaming, a rat up his pajamas.
bigger girls had beaus and got knocked up;
the younger ones learnt their lesson; no girl
was driven off. When the oldest son went to war
she gave his pocketknife to the littlest
but the son came back and the little boy teased
without mercy until thrown in a snowbank.
The husband took her to Montana where
there was work, but she saw only the train
tracks behind the old house, winding golden into the
trees; he had to bring her home. For their solid
married life she kept a slow brother whose
room smelt of used washcloths. When they put her
in a rest home (cancerous then, he could not keep her
from burning things), they took the brother too.
"All those years," said the husband. All those years.
She lived six months. She died of a broken heart.
Their kids call it divorce, say he had a woman
on the side. But the youngest cries to think of it:
"She deserved better." Swears he himself drank with
the other woman: 200 pounds, took whiskey like
water, just called Dad out of loneliness.
I'm guilty--guilty--I don't care--
first the little girl was here--
crescent bangs, eyes direct blue,
studied half an instant, then
skipped right through.
I could write books on what
she didn't do.
Four rooms across the Academy fence,
the gardener's family's four rooms
over the manor fence; her yard was nothing but
worn lawn under a few old trees.
It's a wonder I noticed this little.
Her fence was the school's fence; sometime
an acorn or ball had to splinter a window like
candy cracking; did her boy return it? Did it
then become a game? Did her husband rise before
the dew had wasped to nothing in the early
sun? Did she sleep in with the babies 'til
he returned for morning meal? Did the job
endure through winters, recession, alumni-stinting?
Did it pay him a small income at sixty-five?
Did he live to sixty-five? I never asked.
It was dark up the stairs; things were
stored there, chaos and clothes; cheap
curtains hung at the bottom. He was gone
when I knew her, but I can hear his voice calling
as I heard hers calling a namesake from the foot of the stairs:
uh-LIZZ-UH-buth,
uh-LIZZ-UH-buth--
bells in the way she said it, her syllables singsonging up the stairs.
I sing it now to the cat, which lays its paw on my neck.
The clutter was pleasant, not out of control
in the small kitchen lacking oak, linoleum
aged and dark like the sink, old pans' enamel
worn away. She cooked mostly stews and once
I brought her chicken wings which she added to
the pot. Later, more awake, I brought her roast
she added to the pot.
I started to see but noticed still so little.
One room: the sitting room, window silled
with geraniums. There she kept a cot for nights
she couldn't make it up the stairs. Was
she happy? She seldom smiled but quietly
fussed over plants and grandchildren. A blonde
daughter-in-law telephoned every day.
I never made it up the stairs, not in two years.
Four rooms: her parents house? Had she tended them
in old age? Had she lived before this in a
second-story flat or rented farmhouse, adding
sharecrops to school wages? I didn't ask.
So why am I asking now? I don't even remember the
knick-knacks. Think: there must have been a
plaster handprint, some made object from a
child. There must have been photographs.
This is the hardest poem I've ever written.
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