More poems from
Before it's LIGHT
MY MOTHER AND THE BED
No, not that way she'd
say when I was 7, pulling
the bottom sheet smooth.
You've got to, saying
hospital corners
I wet the bed much later
than I should. Until
just writing this, I
hadn't thought of
the connection
My mother would never
sleep on sheets someone
else had. I never
saw any stains on hers
though her bedroom was
a maze of powder, hair
pins, black dresses.
She used to bring her
own sheets to my house,
carried toilet seat covers.
Lyn, did anybody sleep
in my, she always asked.
Her sheets, her hair
smelled of smoke but she
says the rooms here
smell funny
We drove at 3 AM
slowly into Boston and
stripped what looked like
two clean beds as the
sky got light. I
smoothed on the form
fitted flower bottom.
She redid it.
She thought of my life
as a bed only she
could make right
IN MY MOTHER'S LAST HOURS
I write titles for
poems I'll never
write while she's
living in a note
book, shaking as
her eyes roll back
and I feel guilty
I sat on the out
side stoop this noon
while the nurse's aide
changed her. Mama
my mother calls out
only a few weeks since
we took the ambulance
down here thru black
eyed susans and she
wanted muffins,
coffee, wanted to
smell the air on
the lake. Her skin
the nurse says is
already mottled. Lyn,
she gasps, take
me home
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EARLY FRIDAY I WONDERED, SUDDENLY, WAS CAB CALLOWAY LIVING, WAS
HE DEAD
leaped to the Boardwalk where my mother had us
waiting in line for a chance to see his
crinkly Hi De Ho laugh tho my sister and I
wanted to feel the salt wind lick us like
sailors' eyes, safe in the leash of our
mother's sighs no matter how tight my sarong
dress of aqua and jade leaves like one my
mother would pick out when she couldn't
still walk, let alone think of shimmying to
Minnie the Mocher, only got it after making
me try it on saying she couldn't even be buried
in it. Salt wind and lights like rhinestones
and diamond as unlike the room she left when
she was hostage to my sister's bossiness, her
perfect body, tiny and blonde as we grew like
flowers my mother over-watered, wild to make
sure nothing died, now spreading beyond even her
biggest clothes as she plotted to keep the sun
dress she could never wear that July when she
helped my mother out on an ambulance ride south.
But that June we were teens, my sister wrapped
in dreams of races and jockeys like Willie Hard
Tack and I in my even smaller sleek clothes
were herded in to hear this man who wiggled as much
as Elvis.Our mother's hair, black fire shaking, maybe
46 or 47- too old we figured then to be so taken by Cab's
flirty eyes, his scat hinting at what our mother couldn't
imagine we were sure, let alone want
more poems from Before it's LIGHT
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