Poetry Magazine, Cynthia Hogue, April 2002

Poetry Magazine

Cynthia Hogue

USA

Rhapsody in Hand(s)

You held hands and I was there.
I was there, but my hands were in my lap.
You held hands in your mind.
You thought you held hands.
(Imagine holding the hands of the Chilean minstrel.
They were thrown away. You could not hold them.
What gets put back in its place.) My place
was not in your hands but I was there.

When we ate the apples on the fruit plate.
And if we got some money, you said.
But travelling light is not limiting
and one can, for example, buy oranges
and cashews from Mozambique where the starving
importunates travel but some people here
sell their produce in order
to get money there in the people's hands.

She said my mother holds the hand that can't
move cupped to the sky. I said my mother wrings
hers. After visiting my mother,
you wrung your hands for a week. You're becoming
my mother, I said. I'm becoming
my mother, she said. She waved her hand
before her face, which was a habit
and didn't dispell. She quoted her.

"We think back through our mothers."
A tall gaunt woman whose mother
"died of overwork easily at forty-nine."
But there was habit a leftover relic! Left behind,
she would stand at the door
waving until her brother rounded the corner.
"--a flutter of the dead hand
which lay beneath the surface of family life."

"All I do is work work work,"
my niece said, repeating her grandmother.
I am not afraid to go home.
My hands cup coffee mugs. Wash dishes.
Wring themselves. We think through our mothers.
"I am afraid to go home." In the pictures,
Marianella's hands are covered with small burns
from the cigarettes of the secret police.

I said I'd be right back, but I was still there.

***originally published in How(ever)1,
and collected in The Woman in Red (Ahsahta Press, 2000 rpt.)

Domestic Elegy
for S.Z. (1947-1948)

Sunlight could reach you
(if there were a you): shining
through leaves into a treehouse
where a boy calls your ghost.
Almost a ghost himself, when alone,
he dreams and cannot understand.
How could it be that your husband,

so calm on the phone, lured you back,
shooting you in front of your child
in a suburb where folks tsk-tsk
about their neighbors' unkempt lawns?
What had you thought, driving those few
minutes to pick up your son? Nothing
scared you enough. The dying—

your ex's stepping from behind
a bush, taking aim—was too fast.
You cried, "No, Tom, don't,"
then couldn't see to see.
Now twenty years later : shots one night.
Next day whispers, All three dead.

I wash glass in autumn dusk.
walk outside to rake.
Across the street, the a lawyer D.A.
in his wheelchair wheels home.
He's seen the worst, keeps
his own counsel. He waves.
I wave back, until
it's too dark to see.

***originally collected in The Never Wife (Mammoth P, 1999)

Monique

I feel raped by being robbed until
my student’s raped. The man, a father
from the daycare center where she works,
stopped by to "talk about his son."

Surprised alone, she let him in.
Her cop boyfriend did not want the guys
at work to know. It took her two days
to file a report against his will.

The rapist, who had a record,
skipped state. I make the calls
she needs—hotline, counselor, doctor
(HIV tests must wait)—and offer

what I have: a safe place, this ugly
office with its split-pea walls and dead,
ant-eaten palmetto bugs I cannot bear
to touch.. She comes to last class,

turns in her study of the Barbie doll.
It's full of carefully-collaged pictures,
poetry. She says she's all right,
she’ll move to Tampa this summer

with her boyfriend who really
understands now. When she leaves,
I leaf through her dream-life
which I cannot grade or keep.

***originally published in Paterson Literary Review
and collected in The Never Wife (Mammoth P, 1999)

Young Girl in Family Portrait
(after a photograph by Sally Mann)

Mother's eyes are closed;
her face upturned seeks heaven.
Above a scallop-collar
her daughter's
head floats, over which a cloud blooms.
Behind her, brother plays with a fish
he has dismembered, covered in the bright
blood.
Mother is due again.
As she leans against the clothes wringer,
her belly sags huge below her scrunched-up blouse.
She cradles her eldest. The girl
stares straight into the camera.

At a distance the child looks serious,
an old soul.
Up close she's hurt, one eye swollen shut
as a geode. The child being beaten
is not in the picture, only the beaten child
whose sister has strung wilting lilies
around her neck. Mother will teach her
to dance, as she taught sister
rising naked upon a picnic table,
a prepubescent wraith on tiptoes with spread
wings.

Though not in the picture, the father
will again come to the child
and when she can she'll leave him
to find him in a younger self
she will try to heal.
Preserved in a moment of peace
the child unblinks her good eye.
She's young.
She will not heal.

***originally published in Feminist Studies
and collected in The Never Wife (Mammoth P, 1999)