I Give Voice to My Mother

I. Inside a Gift

Inside a gift
is something
unexpected

just as
inside a shell
is the sound
of the unseen

inside
my heart
is your voice

inside a snowflake
an entire storm

inside an oxbow
the river’s direction

inside morning
is evening.

II. A Healing

She pulled water
from a bowl, flicked it
across a shirt, a napkin, an apron––

and rolled each
into damp fists.

I ironed handkerchiefs––
my fathers’, white cotton
without embellishment,
the sort that came in packages of ten
from the five and dime.
Iron, fold, iron, fold
down to perfect squares––
geometry to heal loneliness.

When I no longer needed
a box to stand on
I ironed my father’s dress shirts,
my mother’s blouses––
collars and darts small challenges––
skirts with box pleats,
and the black and white
cutwork tablecloth she labored at
two winters, the linen heaped
in her lap
like a cat or a warming stone.

No, I did not iron that cloth
for it came out of the linen closet
only that once.

III. Song

At any given time she only owned
one sturdy bra. After awhile white rubber threads
escaped the cotton shell, and the shoulder straps

curled in delicate scallops over her shoulder.
She bowed to settle her breasts into the cups.
Her father, a preacher who believed

in the virtue of thrift, allowed one square
of toilet tissue, three, if necessary. His pencils,
(she told us many times–as if, though he died

when she was young, she still could not believe––)
he arranged by size, each sharp as the poison of certainty.
From the alley on winter school-day afternoons

in the cold and hoary dark I watched her
in the haloed light of the stove’s hood.
I could see her contentment

or her anger in how she bent to her task. She’d
woven a nest of silence and dark around herself.
I wanted to enter it a pilgrim but did not know how.

IV. Hand

Sometimes when I play–
an invention, say, or a nocturne––
I catch sight of her hands on the keys.

She pounded veal and threw
a shuttle, played Liszt and Chopin,
painted damask roses, darned socks,

read palms. Mine, finally, I’d begged enough.
My hand in hers: perhaps she agreed
for the heat. My right warming her left.

She stroked the lines and mounts,
folded up the map of my fingers.
When I was born she cried––her hand
couching mine––because I looked like her.

V. Cadence

Pain just there, same
place as a month ago
You wouldn’t obey
the doctors, you said
on the phone, you’d go
home to Scarlatti
and Brahms, to Minnie
purring in your lap,
you’d insist on the long
strains between breaths,
the pizzicati of oxygen.

At the end––my father told
me on the phone––you gave
yourself to your body,
every breath a mark
on time’s surface, a shallow
etching, shallower each one,
as if a needle were rising
from the groove,
the cat purring in your lap,
your hand in my father’s,
even at the end the cat
purring in your warmth,
and your eyes lifted upward
to see what was taking
its course, to see beyond
your body, as if
to witness your own cadence.

V. Some Mornings

I wake and know
you’ve been with me

in the night
while bats move through the air

collecting mosquitoes, and stars
fall and never land.

Your voice––
how can I not

hear it in daylight hours.
It if knocks against

the membrane of day
I am deaf to it.