Submerged
My mother spent the last half of her pregnancy in an iron lung submerged, murky
trolling for breath.
She used to be a painter and a pianist
surrounded by air and light,
color and melody.
How could she get used to living encased
in the amorphous,
atonal, antiseptic
day in, day out of fluorescent light,
and the relentless drone of the mechanical lung?
My mother didn’t live a long life.
I think the price to stay
must have felt like usury.
Once she relinquished her dreams
she let the undertow
take her away.
In the Shadow
She seemed like a fragile flower, petrified as though she had inhaled the dust of late-summer’s drought, that summer my mother came home.
By then our two-flat felt like a crooked house, three generations listing, top-heavy with age and infirmity. At the window she dozed and tilted in her chair, wheels locked. I learned to slide out the front door unnoticed, happily avoiding her impossible gaze.
Things were not right. Vigilant on my tricycle with the big front wheel, I traveled the neighborhood. My uniform, a babushka and a too-big leather bomber jacket, I patrolled Francisco Avenue to Devon and back up. I scoured backyards, houses, alleys and gangways inspecting people.
I knew of no other preschooler in this line of work. I felt important as I rode with purpose, avoiding pitfalls like old people, tree-rooted sidewalks, kids.
After circling awhile, I’d return down the back alley, slip into the house through the basement door.
What Isn’t
a rock is itself
only a rock until it isn’t anymore
when it becomes say, a cornerstone
that binds what has been,
what is to come
You see, there was a time she felt as though she was stepping through a gate laden with brambles. Knotted underbrush clung to her thoughts so heavily she might topple – untenable, leaden, the smell of ruin, the taste of loss
There was a person,
herself, only a person until
she wasn’t anymore
On the other side of the gate at a distance, she fell upon strewn artifacts, a shambles of possibility, re-patterned replicas protruded from the ground, minute bits of colored glass, clouded gems, tattered silks and linens. Deconstructed shards unclaimed, they disappear as she reaches for them. She has to rest from her foraging because, in her way of thinking, none of the pieces fit. She needs something beautiful to be hidden here.
In Memory: Marie Kartholl Cassidy June 23, 1914 – September 11, 1975 Rest in Peace
