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[for my mother]
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Liminal
crepuscular
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You take my hand and lead
me from the porch, leavings
of sticky watermelon rind,
half-eaten hotdogs, out into
the yard where the older kids
whoop in the descent
of darkness almost too deep
to see through; at its edge
grownups in folding chairs,
the orange winks of their cigarettes
like lightning bugs.
.
Too dark. You feel me hanging back
but here around the corner
real fireflies guide us, cool green,
silent. You catch one
in your hands, Like this . . .
when I was a girl, laughing
in the twilight; you pinch off
its tiny ember and smear
the glowing on your eyelids
so that when you close your eyes
its faint gaze assures
that you still see me.
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And the truly wondrous thing,
besides this moment together while
the luminescence fades
and I am able too to laugh,
is that once you were a girl.
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All stories are true. The story’s facts may get a bit smudged & skewed, a bit shuffled & stretched, a bit jiggled & juxtaposed & conflated, but the story’s truth is undiminished. Good stories know their truth. The best stories know your truth. You discover it in their pages. Perhaps it was always in you, smudged & skewed – now you are following its trail into the open.
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A poem has its own particular way of telling its story. Planed down until you can see the grain. That burl is a metaphor for the winter storm when something cracked. The curly maple echoes laughter you can still hear tinkling faint from the past. Storms and laughing are metaphors for what you’re facing this morning when you roll out of bed. The poem rolls you out of bed. It won’t feed you lying down.
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And in a poem the story lives on its own fine edge. It balances the limn between nothing and everything. Wait here, breathing slowly, at the transition between dusk and night. Or between darkness and dawn. The poem’s story may seem at ease but in the silence beside the swift river you can hear the rush, the flow, the movement. The poem taps the shoulder of awareness – look ahead, look back, live right now in all those moments that coalesce to make a life. Your story is unfolding, and don’t you know it’s true?
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Liminal
riparian
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Let’s tube the Brandywine: you
are brilliant, my kids so fractious,
lucky to keep them for an hour
in the same room with Grandmommy
much less engaged.
All the lazy afternoon
watched over by staid sycamores
of summer, the splashing,
the dunking, and through smooth
passages you get them talking
about yesterday’s museum, Howard Pyle
and the Wyeths, art, its stories,
how if we can only imagine
something strongly enough
we may make it so.
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Imagine: all things flow,
the benevolent stream, its clarity
every possibility of color
and everything it collects,
benediction of damp
on our bodies, water and salt,
half-adrift in the dailyness
of life and where
might this meandering take us?
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At the takeout toweling off
you touch my shoulder, point:
a tree swallow’s looping masterwork
has knit together river, forest, sky,
metallic blue . . . brilliant.
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A story about Mom: when I was five we lived in a little house on Marion Road in Memphis. Mom had made a special cake for my birthday surprise, German chocolate with thick gooey coconut and pecan frosting. She hid it in the little closet pantry until after supper, but when she brought it out for five candles, she wept. It was covered with ants. Don’t you think my brother and I were able to pick off the little crawlies and eat it anyway? And every year at birthday time we piped up, “Mom, make us another Ant Cake!” It was years before she could laugh.
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Another one: Mom and Dad moved away from the South before I was born, but her friends in Michigan or Ohio or Delaware could still detect the remnants of her North Carolina accent. I believe they always thought her a bit prim. When I was fifty I happened to visit Mom in Wilmington DE around Halloween. She said, “Let’s go trick-or-treating!” I figured we’d just walk down the block and say Hi to the neighbors, but she came out of the bedroom wearing a cape and hunchback, an old wig pulled all the way down over her face, and stark staring eyes painted on her cheeks. A wooly booger. None of the neighbors knew who the hell she was and they flinched visibly when she cackled.
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Last story?: Mom was the czarina of crosswords, and she could finish the entire Jumble in the morning paper while I was still juggling the first word. The last few months of her life, at ninety-six, she would sit on the couch after breakfast and I would bring in the paper, sit down beside her, and hand her a pen. Sometimes, I admit, I had to offer her hints (assuming I myself could figure out the words). But at times she would put pen to paper, hesitate just a moment, and fill in the blocks with faint, spidery letters. Just right, Mom. Just right.
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Liminal
nonagenarian
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Every Sunday after church I knock
at your kitchen door then forge on through
to the living room before you can struggle
from your favorite chair, milky tea
half-finished, The Times crossword
and a few spaces you’ve saved me,
78 down, wings, four letters, and today
I’ve brought my grand-daughter,
.
your great-. We’ve taken to calling her
Sister like your brother and all
the cousins called you,
and while she cuddles your old doll
almost ninety itself and explains
to it the universe of her three years
you settle your pad across your lap,
charcoal on your fingers, capture
the purity of her which is the closest
we will ever come to defining love,
the three of us a grand alignment
.
of planets in some untrammeled
system, and although the scratch scratch
on paper binds me to this moment
I see you luminescent, intangible,
the halo of fine white hair that limns
your face, your wings, alae,
strong enough to lift us all.
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Bill Griffin
first appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal – Issue 32, Summer 2018
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Many thanks, Judd. Watch for a personal email with instructions. ---B