In the top drawer, so different from
the
soft, neatly folded clothes: her necklaces ––
pearls
and beads, the pink coral
trickle
and click through my fingers –– feel
the
precise weight of the tangle
of
memory and dream.
*
Fatherless, my secret terror
is that some abrupt power may snatch her, freeze
my panicked ten-year-old stare through the windscreen
(for almost a whole half hour)
at the corner of the shopping centre where
she must reappear –– now! –– so my world can snap back.
*
Just once, at her dressing
table, pawed
by my anxiety (‘but are you really
my mother or, or…’)
she swings round a scary-alien-face: ‘Ha!’
*
Her
gentleness scales down the fear
of
girls –– women with all their marvelous difference
never
too strange or too far.
*
Yet sex is part of the great
unspoken, an ‘information’ booklet: blotchy
grey and white photos, the girl’s pubescent v
retouched to a modest blur ––
like her life-drawings, the shapes
worried and tentative, furred.
I will have to find that bare continuous line
for myself.
*
Her eye is for colours lifted
from
an Irish landscape –– mossy and warm ––
or
seascapes, like one she sketched
from
the deck of a boat towing
yellowy
moonlit waves, the African coast’s
mountains,
taller than Dublin’s
and
inset with pale cities: our day trip
from
Torremolinos to Tangiers
receding
as we watched, at home between continents.
*
Innocence,
yes, though neither naïve nor saintly ––
a
working part of her instinct: second eldest
in a
family of seven, calm
at
the eye of the tantrum: ‘Oh,
I was
always the peacemaker’.
*
The heavy-headed roses have grown
dishevelled,
swaying above her
as
she stoops with secateurs
among
straight, woody stems, extravagant thorns,
burying,
I once pompously wrote,
‘her
regret’ (At what? Not having lived
a
more ordered or wildly-lived life? Not being sure
of
herself or what she should do?).
More likely just pleasuring, becoming lost in
velvety
pinks, creams, carmines
curling
like old photographs
tattered
and edged here and there
with
tea-brown stains.
*
In a
narrow alcove above her bed, plyboard shelves
sag a
little, like hammocks, under the weight
of
her cluster of books: Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs,
Belloc,
Betjeman, A Child’s Garden of Verses,
Winnie The Pooh, The Larousse Encyclopaedia
of Greek Mythology, a Dream Dictionary (that warns
against
dreams about weddings: funerals
in
disguise), James’s Michener’s Iberia:
grown-up
black and white photographs
of
hot dust, sharp shadows, blood, sweat, age.
What
else? The Wind In The Willows, Leaves of Grass.
*
Searching her room for Photoplay or She ––
glossies that might (unlike the
monochrome Lady)
reveal a lucky breast, I lift
the mattress
and find a Cosmopolitan that unfolds
a naked, hairy Burt Reynolds (his
flashy grin
sporting a bent cigarillo) on
a bearskin,
one elbow propped on the
white-fanged muzzle,
a protective forearm lax
between his thighs.
A man, masculine and
vulnerable, absurd
as my own pink fantasies, the TV ad:
‘…and all
because the lady loves Milk Tray’ ––
her long-vanished
brand of cigarette, Kingsway
(a
white pack with a red ribbon and gold crown),
her
style –– the way she wore scarves, belts, slacks,
touches of
elegance, flourishes, grace-notes
on a graph of
yearning, how high and how far ––
thirty
years to celebrate, to love her
for making ‘a little something’
of her own desire.
*
There
was Pound’s Fascist rant:
‘Oh how hideous it is
To
see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots
And
with some branches rotted and falling.’
Then
Raymond Carver’s (quieter, more honest) ‘Fear
of
having to live with my mother in her old age
and
mine’
and here we are, and the
greater fears
go
blundering past like gale-force
window-rattling
golems, far
too
overblown to get a foot in the door.
*
As the home-help women help
my mother out of her clothes
and, if she can make it,
onto the shower stool,
some stay silent, while others
sprinkle a few words, names
like Darling or Dear. I think
she prefers the names. I do.
They drive from M50 estates ––
Clonee, Tyrrelstown, Blanchardstown,
late of that dusty-green cloak
of a continent –– carrying
the business of the world
helping, into our home.
And their own names sound like endearments –
Ola, Ayesha and the one
who is coming on Wednesday: Purity.
*
An afterlife: arthritic, room-bound
with
one of our cats, Claire, Hillary, Toby…
comfortably
draped on the TV’s
sleepy
cornet of Coronation Street
or The Antiques
Roadshow
while
a bright patch of winter sun dulls
the
orange coals: ‘Is it bad today?’
‘Ah yes,
singing
in my bones.’
*
But I remain wary of this
premature
mourning, however inevitable,
admiring
her doggedness, how on that slow train
boarded
at the end of the first World War,
her
‘proper’ age never arrived,
so,
at 93 (with her two sisters
nearest
in age gone like supporting walls),
she
confides as if for the first time:
‘It’s hard getting old.’
*
She’s
driving a little too fast, as if we didn’t have
this
whole day to tunnel through –
high-hedged
shuttle of fields, hills, sky
a
ladder of cloud-ribs, shadow-flits. She smiles
at
something I can’t guess and the road rises
and
plunges steep enough for a gulp
of
vertigo as the canopy unzips and I see
ahead,
slate-blue roughed with white, some cove
we
visited so long ago I remember
the
nested stones, cool sand. She turns to me
with
that smile and makes it mine.
The above is excerpted from a loose sequence I was working on when she died last February. It feels odd to post this, a bit transgressive, almost a violation. I remember Philippe Jaccottet's visceral disgust (expressed in a poem of his) at the very notion of a writer bringing specific biographical details concerning a loved one, or anyone close to him/her, into a poem. But then I also remember Patrick Kavanagh's lovely poem in memory of his mother:
'O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us - eternally.'
Or there is Heaney's poem from his (not at all loose) sequence of 'Clearances', about remembering peeling potatoes with his mother while he attended her death-bed:
'So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.'
So there are certainly precedents, not that I can ever measure up to them.
In any case, Happy Mother's Day mum.
