A TRILOGY: Chicago, Summer 1946

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, the 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.   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,  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 of Marie Kartholl Cassidy   June 23, 1914 – September 11, 1975   Rest in Peace

Photo: My Mom with my brother Tom the summer of 1942, four years before she contacted polio in the summer of 1946.

Submerged https://www.thegreatsmokiesreview.org/2012/poetry/submerged

Jean Cassidy

Copyright 2014