Get the Little Black Curlers
and Brown Eyebrow Pencil
from the Middle Drawer,
My Mother Instructs from Her
Bed in the Cardiac Monitoring Unit
of Intensive Care
Tucked neatly in the center of her middle drawer,
a lidless box beds down
the enamel heart carried to her from Sacre Coeur
where I lit candles for her weak heart
instead of calling to say, “Paris is not
that far away.”
Wedged in the left corner, an old Sunday missal
keepsake of a secular summer
spent at the drugstore soda fountain rather
than at catechism and mass, cracks
as any cold plastic cover will in an
unrepentant grasp.
Lined along the back side, a procession of envelopes
stuffed full with certificates
of insurance, citizenships, baptisms and deaths
I should have, in another simple task, taken
off to lock in the bank box, slip forward
as fallen angels can.
The drawer jams, kicks in a whim,
plummets like a tantrum to the floor
where I cry, “How ever will I, one day alone
on my own, make sense of all this mess?”
MY MOTHER'S LEGS
forthcoming in Paterson Literary Review
This is the journey of the body, its hesitant footsteps
as it walks back into its own flesh. I close my own
eyes so I can see better where we are going.
from “Hands” by Margaret Atwood
My mother’s legs appeared to me
again today. This time in a pivot,
her toe pointed in a brown pump,
calf taut, the way
I first saw it tighten
when she pulled herself up
by my father’s shoulders,
under the porch light
when she thought I wasn’t looking,
to kiss him on the cheek.
Her legs appeared again
to me. There was a stage.
It was backlit, draped with velvet,
the way she told it, with a banner that read:
Miss Legs of Mercy Hospital,
the honor of bed pans, dated
magazines, the job
as a nurse’s aide.
I thought, of course,
they danced.
I saw my mother’s legs again,
under the dance hall ball, a flicker
of lights skipping whitewashed walls,
in a marathon
where she jitterbugged
a sawdusted floor
at a Moose or the Polish Falcons, with men
sporting vacant stares who let her
lean into the breadth of their chests
and doze for a trophy.
I saw them, they appeared again,
this time switched and welted
by bad boys in Central Park where she walked
alone at dusk seeking the solace of trees.
Mean, she said, rubbing the ghost
of their pain from her legs,
some hooligans she never forgot
in stories she repeated to me
about the dangers living away
from home, even escaping her own
father’s belt at her legs.
One time I saw them, her legs,
so pink, she on reddened knees
scrubbing the worn kitchen tiles.
Baby doll legs, I thought then watching
when she looked up, tossed
the brush back into the soapy pail, a slosh
of suds splashing up at us
as she pulled me into the plush of her
young belly, the soft sweet of her small
breasts, and whispered to me,“now don’t you
run your roller skates across my clean floor.”
And how we giggled then
because she knew I would.
The last time I saw my mother’s legs,
they were splayed out from under her.
I could not rub away the cold and pale
and deadly still. I put some slippers
on her feet.
This is the life she made
for me to walk into.
This is the way
it works now. I end up
on my knees,
on the damp ground offering
a flurry of mums to an altar of earth
where she was placed. I look into the palms
of my soiled hands, turn my eyes
from the sunblotched sky,
and say,
Oh, my dead mother,
of what use now
those legs?
Revering a Hawk from a Mountaintop
(after Robert Bly’s “Hunting Pheasants in a Cornfield”)
I
What is so fetching here about a bird crossing sky?
It is a hawk, fire-tipped wings spread wide and strangely
Silent. My eyes drift with it at dusk in Autumn.
I crook my neck from this mound of earth and look.
II
It rained all day in skips along a bone-dry season.
The muddy trails are strewn with slips of leaves.
The sun is setting down, birds in branches atwitter.
A small happiness wends in where I stand and watch.
III
The mind delights in distances beyond it can circle,
Endures alone inside stretches of still pastureland.
The moon tames the sky with patches of new quiet,
And I content myself with bird wings in my head.
IV
Day folds in its own wide wings, pulls up night covers,
I stay close to the ground and my own skin I crawl in.
I do not know all the things I could yet come to love.
At twilight, we do what we must, eyes turned upward.
©Copyright, 1999, Andrena Zawinski
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.