Postscript to an Elegy

 

A Small Plot in the Short Story of Our Lives

We went to her home to celebrate

her sixty-fourth.

My father made dinner,

and when my sister arrived

we sang Happy Birthday.

We looked for signs,

without knowing what to look for.

We ate her favorite cake, pineapple cheese, 
disguised with whipped cream.

She opened gifts,

and my sister’s youngest son

brought a bright burst
of red-and-white carnations

in a small blue vase,

delicate as our hope.

I read a few poems

about Elizabeth and Race Street,

a small plot in the short story of our lives,

and we believed that we once lived recklessly

but in a more sensible time,

that sorrow will belong to all of us

at the end of our lives.

She was wearing her new wig,

and I thought about her

lying on the gurney, the long tube in her nose

that filled her lungs with water,

and how they rinsed her kidneys for four hours

before they dripped Cisplatin and Vinblastine

through a needle in her vein,

slowly as an hourglass.

She did not want to tell us

about her headaches and nausea,

that her arms bruised easily as peaches,

and how her fingertips tingled.

But we asked her,

and we trespassed on her life,

not knowing that the denouement

lay just beyond her next birthday.

Watching My Mother Die

Hope slammed its door

behind my mother’s right ear

where tumors grew like broadleaf weeds.

Her hands, even more frail now,

trembled from a fractured life.

These were hands that once pulled a die

from a child’s nose,

pushed slivers out of his fingers

with straight pins,

and soothed fevers and bad dreams.

Betrayal turned her hands to a light-blue thinness—

unable to do the things required of the living.

Black branches spread across her lungs 

and welded to her cerebellum. Her faced distended.

Her mouth erupted with tiny sores.

Her eyes held the tell-tale sign

while she lay silently staring 

at the discord of medicine bottles,

impassive icons, and votive candles

on her bedroom dresser.

Hanging in the Balance

My mother, 

her head sinking into pillows,

cursed squirrels—their high-wire acts,

these other lives hanging in the balance,

crossing telephone cable 

high above her bedroom window.

For days, they made her flash accents of life.

“They keep me awake all day long,

running on the roof,” she’d say.

My father—

his old legs wobbling on rungs,

the cage held tightly in one hand,

the trip wire set and smeared with peanut butter—  

trapped squirrels off the pitched roof.

“I caught eleven and one robin,” he said.

“I brought them to the cemetery and let them go.”

The robin remained, 

its bold breast blazing through the bony tree.

My father and I listened for gray squirrels.

“They’ll never come back,” I said.

And the World Kept on Living

It was as easy as withholding food and water

from someone whose world had turned

in to migraines and morphine.

So why do I have to know 
if she floated above me like some magical act

while the vinyl bag zipped closed 
over her swollen face,  

and if death is more than what it is?

Why do I have to know 
whether her prayers helped,

and if her long suffering 
and Catholic indulgences

paid dividends like mutual funds,

and whether dreamless sleep 
is just a short rehearsal

for the only afterlife we will never know?

And why do I have to know

the endings to unfinished stories,

and if all her collections 

were meaningful to her
at the end of her life

like the passive, religious figurines

that had nothing but cheap plaster for souls?

The day she died, billions of white crystals

buried her home 
in a cold fusion of free-falling light,

and the world kept on living.

Wishing for No Afterlife

It hardly matters

that someone can come to believe 
in nothing.

Watching my mother die,

I understand the illusions we devise

to cope with our suffering.

Dorothy Brown (December 19, 1925 - December 30, 1990)

"A Small Plot in the Short Story of Our Lives" was originally published in Troika V by Thorntree Press with a different title, 1994; "Hanging in the Balance" was originally published in Prairie Light Review with a different title, 1992.