Smith Studio

Passage

In bed he stretches his arms, his legs, wind-up hands in the air keeping

himself alive. His feet never stop as he blows and whistles. We are thinking

he is going to die. But he doesn’t. He watches the big screen that sends him

visions while he marches to the music in his head and sings softly under his

breath, whistling to us to tell him which door.

“You’ll know we say. You’ll know.”

“Which door?” Whispering off into silence.

Uncomfortable we wish for the rattling of his breath. It doesn’t come.

She whispers to him, “Breathe. Breathe.”

Her eyes turn to me pleading with me to make him take a breath. Crazy, I

laugh. My super powers are gone. No longer equipped to heal I am silent.

A holy ghost enters and his breath becomes rattled with sound, the sound

of breathing. My mother sings. His soul lingers on her tongue waiting for

the last kiss. It could be months it could be days it could be moments.

Still the kiss waits.  

From A collection of poetry, Stealing Matter

Mother Daughter Monologue

Blinded By Silence 

Ilene, a Southern woman in forties or fifties. She has cared for her elderly parents for 10 years. Dad has passed away and Mom at ninety is still doing well but has memory lapses/mild dementia. Ilene has been cleaning out the house and disposing of her father’s belongings as well as sorting through some of her mother’s memorabilia.

The tag’s still on this. I used to wonder around the house and put my name on all the items I wanted. “Mom promised this to Ilene. You Dare Not Take It!”  I wanted something.  Not something expensive, just something.  An object I could touch, smell.  She unpacks shoes and trinkets, unwrapping and smelling them.  Like wind in the trees you were always there but my hands seemed to go right through you.  I remember your smell, the dampness of my tears rolling down my cheeks wetting your gown. Bowes and pumps, rags tied in hair searching for the ever evasive curl. 

It’s the middle of the night and I should be dreaming of little girl things, like Babies, Kens and Candy Land games. But dad stands and watches with sleepy eyes asking what’s wrong. I think that you know what’s wrong and I know what’s wrong. Downstairs there’s a TV on the table that spits out voices of police and black men being shot down with hoses and bombs going off in churches and I wonder where God is in all of this and if I will survive this. I know I’m loved, I have many pretty dresses. A toy piano beckons me to play it except that I sit on it trying to cover up the mournful music that dances inside my head, my heart and between my legs where blood oozes down my thigh and you think I’ve cut myself on the toy piano.

Those people, those black people that fall into the gutter knocked down by hundreds of gallons of water seem to be friends of mine as their skin is peeled off their bones by water so harsh it is a razor between my teeth as they scream with the voice I never learned to use on the underside of a pillowcase.

You stroke my hair telling me its okay.  And I love you for your beauty. You are so beautiful.  So beautiful that Loretta Young came to your college campus, a movie star, and chose you as the most beautiful woman on campus. I stare at that picture for hours, it’s so beautiful.

You tell me you always had the biggest breast and the biggest feet and that you hated them.  Shaking your head, I know that you hated those appendages.  It seems that we were both drowning in something we had no control over.  I choke on something in my throat. You enter my room asking what is wrong and I don’t know how to answer because it’s all so wrong.  You have been blinded by beauty as I have by silence. 

Tomorrow I go to have my breasts removed, amputated, the real word for mastectomies. An amputation by any other name remains the same.

How will I get out of bed at 3am to go to the hospital?  Will you stand at the edge of the bed waiting to wake me and wonder who is in bed with me?  I feel like I am Holly Golightly and I am throwing Cat out into the rain.  Tears fall because you are so old and you can’t wrap your mind around what is happening to me or who I am.  Except that you know something is terribly wrong and you tell your equally ancient sister that I have a bug.  A bug.  I listen in disbelief as the two of you discuss my bugs and their good riddance. I inherited your large breasts and big feet. Comments made to me by scavengers of the world wounded me into submission.  Now years later I will donate these articles of attention to science, to save my life; but what about my heart? 

I try to remember that you held me when I was young.  I try to forget that my breasts and nodes are being removed and placed in a bucket somewhere. Axillary nodes frozen.

Will I ever burn again? Not from the pain of the night visitor but from the energy that moves within my pelvis.  That forces me to throw paint on canvas and pound Rachmaninoff on ivory so yellowed by time that it matches your teeth and you tell me everything is going to be okay, knowing that it is not.  But you still smile like a beauty queen and I slip into believing.

How does a mother lose a child under cover of night listening to stragglers being rounded up by men in blue, putting bleeding hearts in cells to sing mournful tunes that drift over Birmingham like silent swallows looking for a safe place to nest?  Here, years later you are losing me again. You are old and I am sick.  Holding your hand I feel scared, so scared I am sure I look like Marley’s ghost.  In your eyes I see something I have never seen before.  All the deaths I’ve suffered didn’t take me from you, but this, this separates us. Your longevity makes it unfathomable to you for me to lose my…   When you were my age they had just developed this surgery and it was only talked about in whispers. In your eyes there is no touching this. Throwing myself on you into those sagging arms, I don’t want you to go.  I’m not ready to go. For all we’ve lost together we should be here forever, eyes sharing mutual pain. Both of us wondering who is Holly Golightly and who is Cat.

Copyright 2008

Selden Smith