Phil Terman
I arose out of her flesh, child out of mother,
body out of body, nurtured and unfolding,
odor out of a rose, song out of song, light
out of its source. We began as one heartbeat
and breath, one soul, centuries before we knew
separation and loss, before we beat our fists
against our breasts. And the poet-god wrote:
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime,
pleading youth to produce youth in the drama
of desire over time, passion over memory's
opacities, every gesture and word preserved
so that nothing that is filled with truth and beauty
is lost, even onto the next generation, and the next.
*
...my father had a horse and a creaky wagon
loaded with apples and bananas
carting through alleys before the milkman
and sunlight tinted the redbrick
of kinsman avenue when it was still jewish
and always apples he sold for five cents
loading the cart in the long ago
with his ancient horse and bad leg
one shorter than the other every evening
he came home with a little money and apples
and my mother made every form of apple pie
and when he went modern he bought a jalopy truck
and got tickets not for driving too fast but for driving too slow
and every evening he read the yiddish paper...
*
...at night when my mother
was washing clothes
where you turn the handle
i would read under a little bulb
and she tried to bring over
the family from Russia
i wrote the addresses
she used to say
russia it's rusia and i said
mother you just canšt spell
it's rush-a rush-a
she sent money
she sent clothes
to me she always looked old...
*
In the photograph she's perched
on my father's right shoulder, both
in bathing suits, tanned, slightly wet
from the distorted lake beyond, both
laughing at the zaniness of the pose,
filling the frame--he's hoisting her up
with his right arm, her legs stretched
full-length down his hairy torso--her brief
triumph, her proof that at a certain moment
she lived, that at such and such a time
she was loved by a strong man and
handsome, both abandoned to this obvious
happiness, this black and white evidence
that she were lifted aloft and beautiful.
*
put the book aside in the middle of the poem
the one that speaks of laurels moist grass
let your bed remain unmade the blankets tossed about
as during love your own face as it is leave clothes loose
around your body slide into those chinese slippers
that move like leaves across the carpet steal
past dim lights illuminating empty spaces behind
store-front windows the last stop sign the abandoned synagogue
until all that remains are pinpricks of light
filtering through the black yarmulke of sky
look into these look into these
until you discover again those words of the blessing
you spoke every night before bed simply
for the breath of your mother's lips across your cheek
*
The warm wet pool I was dreaming in
woke me sobbing in the pitch-black until
my mother opened the door, the light
streaming behind her. Her hands slowly
slid off my blue pajamas and with a towel
wiped my chilled skin in smooth strokes,
the air taking on the odor of my release.
Without a word, so as not to disturb
my father who worked all day and would again
the next, she stripped the drenched sheets,
unfolded and spread clean ones, lifted
and cradled my shivering body until the quivering
slowed, kissed away the tears and the sweat,
singing me back into my deep sleep once again.
*
Summer afternoon, just before her nap,
my mother taught me how to balance.
She held my thin body steady, her hands
clasping my shoulders past the same houses,
back and forth, back and forth, her grip
loosening so slightly I couldn't tell
when her palms turned to air,
releasing me like a small boat to sail off
through the dark waters of the Buckeye tree
that arched its branches over the street,
my wheels a few inches from the surface.
Her room was silent when I entered
and watched her sleep. Then I lay
down beside her until she woke.
*
Sunday mornings my mother and I would walk up the corner
to Davis Bakery where the old Jewish women behind the counter
wore red schmattes speckled with vanilla splotches, faces patched
with rouge and lipstick, filling the room with kibbitz-song and spinning
around and around the perfect circles of their famous creations:
the egg, the onion, the raison, the plain, still warm and waiting
to be opened and spread. It was all pastry: the coconut bars,
the Russian Tea Biscuits with their layers of strawberry and walnuts,
sugar and dough, the loaves pregnant with rye, pumpernickel, even
the challahs they'd place on request into the ancient silver slicer,
its rusted blades rattling like my grandfather's junktruck along
the cobblestones of Hough Avenue. But we would only buy a box
of matzo, the bread of our suffering, to crumble and fry with an egg, dip
in grape jam with our fingers, smooth the crumbs away with our tongues.
*
My mother can no longer read.
She shuffles, her sweater
spotted, her face vacant
and overwhelmed at the immensity
of the road, the field, the woods
beyond, spiraling wherever the wind
directs her, now pausing, now
picking goldenrod and chicory,
Queen Annšs lace, black-eyed Susans,
stray maple leaves slightly flushed--
now she's scurrying, her arms loaded
with the gifts she would bestow
upon each of her loved ones,
all the earth she can carry.
*
After I signed the proper documents
and turned away from her in her tiny room
looking out over the parking lot
of the Emerald Ridge Nursing Home,
still refusing to take off her purple coat,
and she rushed down the hallway,
trembling, as I pressed the numbers
of the code and the double doors opened
and silently closed behind me--her fists
pounding on the outer edge of her new world:
I want to go home, I want to go home,
I stumbled numb through the lobby
and collapsed in the first chair and wept
like the child, she always called me, of her old age.
*
So often have I invoked her for my muse,
her life touched by the poet's wish to raise me
against the inevitable, her tender heir, flower
distilled, joy delighting in joy, who praise her
and proclaim in this chronicle against her dementia.
Out of each moment's frailty and ultimate loss,
the calendar of day blurring into day into day,
shards of glass giving back the flaws the flesh is,
the gilded monuments of our bodies, out of marrow's
eloquence, the wind's intermittent sonnets streaking
through our loftiest towers of light, I insist:
I am her rose's odor, her art and argument--
returning her life blessed by the poet's birth
and continual making, this victory, this mothering.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Phil Terman
Phil is directing: Chautauqua Writers' Festival
Friday, June 11-Sunday, June 13
Poets: Stanley Plumly and Bruce Smith
Essayists: Mary Karr and Dinty W. Moore
Fiction Writers: Lee K. Abbot and Ann Pancake
Workshops, readings, lectures, round-table discussions, open-mic
All will be held at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York
More information: http://www.ciweb.org (click on "conferences")
or e-mail Philip Terman at ganya@pathway.net or call (814) 786-7270