Private

This poem is about the private nature of poetry, to the writer, and how that can sometimes feel hurtful to family members.

The poem deserves a slight preface, since many of the references may have been obscured by time or they may just be obscure, since they are legalese. So here’s a quick primer:

My family had a set of orange and green (?) glass goblets in the seventies, which had impressions on them like dimples.

It used to be hard to get food from other countries, and therefore we had a greater fascination with and mysticism associated with parts of the world we did not know. Pier One, of course, was and perhaps still is an outlet for imported goods.

Manta Rays are very large and seem to fly through the air for short distances, much like skipping stones on a lake’s surface.

We had a wooden cigarette holder that consisted of a wooden cube or rectangular prism, which held cigarettes out of sight. A quick movement of the cube up and down on its stand would retrieve a single cigarette on top of the cube.

Dayton’s was (is?) a store in downtown Minneapolis, an upscale department store, where we could not necessarily afford anything we wanted, but it was fun to look. The elevators there used to have people in them, who operated them!

My mother was a travel agent as well as a poet, and thus it was literally her job to go places. Four or five years before going to Machu Picchu, my mother had heart attack and a quadruple bypass. She broke her hip sometime after coming back.

My mother wrote a beautiful and encouraging poem way back when my son first had seizures and we weren’t sure of his prognosis. (For his seizure story read this fitting post for this spooky season, Our Stems are Fragile. The title refers to pumpkins.)

In the last stanza I go full-tilt legal. Please forgive me if I am less than perfect in my definitions. Redlining is the practice now outlawed of refusing to lend to people based on their race, as deduced from their current address. Fee simple is complete ownership of a piece of land or whatever’s on it. Restrictive Covenants are laws used to keep certain uses or certain people off the land. They used to be used frequently to exclude non-whites from white neighborhoods. So, in summation, I argue that keeping your poetry to yourself is a kind of prejudicial exclusion. Whew! That’s enough law for one day!

I buy poetry books for you, my mother,

Though you can no longer read them.

Stacks and stacks of anthologies,

Tipping over, on the shelf. 

Like your head, after too much wine,

Cradled in your crossed arms, midnight,

Over sprawling dining table papers,

An effervescent snore on your lips.

Your floral scrawl, illegible,

Runs down the light blue lines:

An errant drop, down a dimpled goblet.

The tablecloth seems vaguely foreign,

Perhaps from Pier One, back in the day

When Toblerones were scarce

And nobody really knew who the Buddha was.

Our walls were pierced with foreign arrows:

In every room, a sign post, pointing elsewhere.

In your poems, you had traveled there, already.

Away from the noisy and mundane.

Away from the ever-needy children.

Away from the whining for dinner,

And the dishes’ perpetual accusations.

In poetry, you were young again.

You were on a beach in Bermuda,

Watching the stone-skipping manta rays.

Or in India, manifesting a cigarette

By raising and lowering a wooden cube. 

You’d go to these places.  All of them.

I wanted to go there, too.

You already were abroad, in your mind,

As we walked hand in hand in Dayton’s, downtown.

Just looking.  Riding upwards,

We’d tell the man in the pillbox hat,

Exactly where he should go.

You were abroad, while you plunked down tulip

Bulbs round the dark-green laundry pole,

And while you made scrapbooks

From shards of torn magazines

Books, that were met with derision.

Later, much later, after even your child

Had flown across the friendly skies,

You made good on your promise and traveled the world.

Port after port, afraid to stop,

In case Death might catch up with you.

You made it your job to go.  And you went.

Postcards from Russia and China and Poland,

Alaska, Guatemala, and Europe.

We met, an ocean’s pilgrimage away,

And boarded a bus to a castle,

And we touched the headstone of a poet,

The one who first wrote “Silent Night.”

Among the summits you climbed: Machu Picchu.

At seventy.  Losing your breath,

Long after your heart leapt out of your chest,

Like a virgin maid, mid-sacrifice.

Returning, you fell on the flat lands,

By Age, abruptly grounded, 

Your passport now, revoked.

Having conquered the world, you now made do,

With book club and publishing poetry.

Not yours, which lay locked in notebooks, silent,

Not to be opened or noticed.

Yet, when I thought I’d lost a child,

Your words effloresced, untangling my heart.

And I blushed, to share your secret.

They’re all I have left of you, poems and journals,

Jangly keys to your private vaults.

And, no longer redlined, I claim them, fee simple,

Shorn of hurtful restrictive covenants,

Like the ones that forbade you

To let me in.

For a poem about attending poetry readings to support poets, read Poetry Reading.