V E R S E and I M A G E

I have to reach deeper each year

for all that is stored

in the pockets of this house.

This is a day we have to slow ourselves

to feel what time has deepened.

My own body, half-remembering,

lingers in a doorway.

Children pick plums

off the near-bare tree

outside the kitchen.

The day dissolves into hungry reaching.

Mother watches at the window

drinking in the one life she must live,

rolls lint in her apron packet,

suffers love in the smallest of things.

She is tired now, a fragile cup

to be hummed into.

I can hear a familiar lullaby

in her good-byes.

We leave all at once

like awkward adolescents

avoiding an intimacy,

Mother’s hands folded on her lap

to fill its emptiness.

We are already

thinking of tomorrow

as if the past

is just a house we visit.

from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007

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“Hey, Bert, how about if your Mom rides with Aunt Jodi?” We are visiting Linda’s youngest sister in West Virginia, first time since Bert was a toddler. This afternoon he’s been running, toad-hopping, climbing, all out exploring the old house and the new one going up beside it. If there is a tether between him and his mother, it has not been visible. Now we’re preparing to drive to nearby Babcock State Park, but we won’t all fit in one car and there’s just the one car seat, in ours. So how about it, Bert? “No! I want Mommy to ride with me.”

Perihelion for comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is just weeks away, mid-September 2024; what will happen as it reaches its orbit’s closest point to the sun? How many thousands or millions of years has it been since it last passed this way? It is so small and it will grow so hot, nearer to the sun than Mercury – will it crack like cold glass filled with hot tea? Or will it hold together, swing wide, its long tail swishing across its face to become anti-tail, a leash preceding the body back into darkness and cold? Those who follow the comet don’t see its tether of gravity but they measure its pull and calculate its path, a once in a million years opportunity.

I haven’t lived in the same home with my mother since June 15, 1974. Even before that there was the year in West Berlin as an exchange student and the three years away at college. Then came fifty years with just a week here and a week there under the same roof, vacations, taking for granted that Mom would still scramble my eggs and make red-eye gravy every morning. And then these last few weeks. Sitting beside her on the couch helping her fill out the Jumble on the comics page. (Me helping her? Inconceivable.) Trying to convince her to eat one more bite of pudding. Bringing fresh flowers from my front yard which never fail to raise a smile. I’ve been saying little goodbyes for months (be honest, for years) and convinced myself I’d laid aside the tether with gentleness and with calm. Perhaps, to be even more honest, I’m only now really feeling its strength.

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You linger in the room, a dark silk.

We sit around in massive silence,

then pleasant and uneasy,

discuss how you willed yourself to die.

We all saw you going,

never waved to you to come back,

as if we did not think

you would really go.

Your body lies life-like

as if dreaming motion.

I feel my own aging,

my hands cold like yours.

I rinse my lips after kissing your cheek

as if death will wash off. I can still see

your closed eyes, your mouth

poised as if forming a thought.

I turn around, expect you

to be standing in the doorway.

you are not there.

You have finally stopped leaving.

from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007

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I learned this in grade school: the roots we can’t see are as big as the branches we can. What tethers the tree to earth and nourishes it is so easy to take for granted. Reading Bird Missing from One Shoulder by Linda Annas Ferguson, I imagine her writing these poems twenty years ago and revealing, first for herself and today for me, much that must have once been hidden. Much that must have been difficult to see as it was happening and difficult to return to later. But Linda’s poetry takes nothing for granted. The connections, the ties, the necessary tug and pull of the heart, all are made beautifully plain.

What is the soil that covers these roots of ours and conceals what should be so plain that we learn it in grade school? Time, of course, saps memory. Yesterday I asked my father about something my mother had told me that I wanted to recall, but it was beyond him. More than time, though, are the curtains we ourselves hang or with which we allow the dailyness of life to cloak us. Some memories are painful; I hold them at bay until the veil frays at 4 AM and they intrude. Some I push aside and promise to deal with later. And some connections, even when truly vital, can’t compete with worrying about the bills and getting to an appointment on time.

Enter poetry. To write, one must pause at least long enough to pick up a pen. Not that a placid morning free of responsibilities is required – I confess I keep a blank page on a clipboard in the passenger seat beside me and start most of my poems at 65 MPH. The “pause,” though, is metaphor for willingness – to open oneself; to glimpse the unseen; to accept that there are tethers that weave through all of our moments and all of our relationships. Sweet, strong, nourishing roots that hold us down, that hold us up. Love, pervasive and powerful as gravity, swings me every day around the sun.

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I can feel her here under the stairs

where she stores pieces of herself

on shelves in yellowed shoe boxes,

a report card from fifth grade,

her mother’s signature in faded pencil

on the bottom line.

A group picture, women workers

outside on the gray grass of the cotton mill,

its tall brick wall the only background,

her fourteen-year-old face

lost in frowns

and fixed smiles of the front row.

Another photo at twenty, a Saturday afternoon

on a steel bridge, Daddy’s arm

around her shoulder posed for a future.

Three purses on ten-penny nails, full of notes,

mementos, money she hides for a child’s needs,

a winter coat, a Sunday dress.

I can feel her here, under the stairs,

every corner collecting her plain

unperfumed warmth,

every photo, saving the girls she wants

to remember, every small portion of paper

a folded page of herself.

from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007

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