REVIVAL
a poem about my mother
Read REVIVAL first on SOFT UNION here
he has given his early rain for your vindication;
he has poured down for you abundant rain,
the early and the latter rain, as before
— Joel 2:23, ESV
Mother followed God to Paraguay.
Too young there to know me then,
I was a son in the afterthought
of my mother’s womb.
My mother, the missionary.
We never spoke until
after father died.
A widower then outside the kennel:
My mother told me once she cried
because she didn’t have any money.
A missionary with no money
for toothpaste by the tube.
I was never nice to you.
A child.
I blamed you that father
had us play hide-n-seek
with the medicine cabinet key.
A toy box on a dining chair.
Tall enough, you dig that ring of keys
out the potted soil of your garden
hanging.
We could never hide it well enough.
We could never stop you quick enough
from swallowing 30 days of drugs whole.
30 days of my mother at night,
rocking against the headboard,
the carpentry of her marital bed
like wings spread from under her
She writhes
my mother writhes
rolling eyes in the overdose.
She’s been there too many times
tied in the night of that black room,
the ceiling fall of her dreams
screaming.
Mother blue in Paraguay.
A seamstress in the shadow
of her family’s cut uniform.
I watch the waterfall behind you
dry on film.
&
Mother
did you find heaven
in that Latter Rain?
Could you find it like
I’m learning to find you now?
All that time with you still alive
yet I chose to live — a son
without a mother on earth.
Severance
sever
& rinse.
I wrote your death in a poem.
This a decade ago.
Mother, you were still alive.
How could I have known
they wouldn’t let me be
at your deathbed.
I wrote you in the emergency ward,
looking for ways to leave.
i wrote you wild with the waves
the way the waters weave
a canvas of spilled tapestry
my mother
the spinster of moods
see how it broods
this angel of death
how it reeks
it’s over now
the morphine flows
the shoulders slump
sockets sunk
in the ivory light—
the white heat.
sweet dreams
the respirator breathes
and i follow the veins
the tubes
the rivers of moon
how it looms away the hurt
& you’re so far away.
(you’re so far away
from me)
So, I open up the photo albums.
I open up the plastic sleeves
of all that film & I page through you.
I look for you, my mother.
I look for you blue & young in Paraguay.
Incredibly moving. There is a sense of lethargic urgency in this one, that feeling of “I have to move” being trapped under “I cannot move.” The line that sticks out most, and perhaps from my reading the underpinnings of the poem is where you wrestle with writing her death while she’s alive, like a vision from before the grave. This is excellent.
chills