Negotiating the Wrecks

Last night I (accidentally) broke a glass in the process of roughly moving a chair across the room. I have an excellent nose. I can smell pot through three doors and one floor. I’m tired of giving trust to liars. Did I ever tell you that my mother died on brown carpet? On a bathroom floor? Breathing in her own vomit? That, of course, was before paramedics resuscitated her and connected her to machines just so I could say, yes, please. Turn them off. So I could eat a final supper beside her. So I could watch.

Lately, I’ve taken my fingernails to old wounds I thought had scarred. Turns out I’ve been washing them and wrapping them and trying very hard to pretend they were gone or maintain them. A friend laughed when I said, who would I be if something wasn’t hurting me? Another question might be if I were happy. If I said I won’t make a victim of myself.

Have I victimized myself if I’m sitting peacefully in a protest line and police spray, pointblank, an orange cloud of chemicals in my face as they did this morning to young UC-Davis students who are simply fighting for the rights this country assured them?

My son smokes and smokes and smokes, and I keep putting fingernails beneath my wounds.

I’ve broken doors down to see things I never wanted to see anyway. I’ve thrown whole lifetimes to the curb from a second story window in convenience and anger. I won’t cry.

I won’t ask you to please not die now because I wanted it to happen until it did. I’d been waiting for that which would stop my life and hold me still while lightning and wind spun all around me. I was just outside of our garage, my hair tangling in the storm, when the man I then loved said he was afraid of death. I felt sorry for him. It was a week after my mother had died. And already I knew it wasn’t my death I should fear but every death that came before mine. I was worried about just how long I might actually live.

On a morning like this, I feel it’s been too long already. I’d like to shut my eyes to the world and pull my hands back only after everything and everyone has finished devouring itself. I can hardly look anymore.

As a girl I thought it was my job to save my mother from the angry hands of every man she ever loved.

As a mother I believe it is my job to save my children from themselves.

As a woman, I breathe and rave and move forward into the grocery store with tears in my eyes. The shine of stacked apples, the open faces of sunflowers, rows and rows of raw meat.

*****

I refuse to edit my morning rant. Do with it what you will. I won’t even read it for spelling/grammar errors. I just want it to be there. This week I’ve begun to write new poems about losing my mother. In the past, I’ve had people approach me after readings and comment on my feelings about motherhood, etc., and I sometimes feel bad saying, you know: I lie in my poems. I begin with a woman who feels much like I do, but my imagined women and sons do things on the page that my sons and I have never done.

They seem disappointed by this.

This week I’ve been trying to write poems that begin in a truer place and stay to a truer emotion about death. My mentor, when asked to provide me with good “dead mom” poems, sent me this poem by Leon Stokesbury:

Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain

Please do not die now. Listen.

Yesterday, storm clouds rolled

out of the west like thick muscles.

Lightning bloomed. Such a sideshow

of colors. You should have seen it.

A woman watched with me, then we slept.

Then, when I woke first, I saw

in her face that rest is possible.

The sky, it suddenly seems

important to tell you, the sky

was pink as a shell. Listen

to me. People orbit the moon now.

They must look like flies around

Fatty Arbuckle’s head, that new

and that strange. My fellow American,

I bought a French cookbook. In it

are hundred and hundreds of recipes.

If you come to see me, I shit you not,

we will cook with wine. Listen

to me. Listen to me, my brother,

please don’t go. Take a later flight,

a later train. Another look around.

Upon first read, I thought, fuck--I’ll never write a poem that subdued yet completely raw about my mother’s death. I wish, but I won’t. From an honest memory of my feelings then, it really would have begun less “please don’t die” and more “please go already, drink yourself to death” and only now would I plead for her to come back…seven years later.

Mostly I’m watching my son circle around himself like a bird with a broken wing. Even as a girl I’d chase the wounded, thinking if I poised myself just so, if I held my hands out with all of the love that I felt, the bird would know I just wanted to help. Wildness, difference, fear of my flightlessness always sent the bird running. My son has no idea that anything’s broken. As far as he can tell, he’s looking down on me in all my stupid worry from a point in himself where he’s flying, convinced he’s not hauling all that weight.

*****