ManicDDaily

this Saturday morning

I woke in the canyon of my mother and
her bedroom wall.  I would sleep there
as a child, from the middle of the night, when I would wake and call
my father, who would shepherd me across the hall
to their dim room, and into
my mother’s slim twin bed. 

The twin beds were a gift
from my grandmother (my dad’s mother). My mother sometimes
laughed about that, though, a child, I did not get the joke.
I saw my parents as a couple, yoked,
but not physical, and was shocked one Saturday morning early
charging their
closed door.

She slept with her back to me; she slumbered
rather than slept, while I, who always slithered to the
inside, danced my feet along the wall.

It was an exterior wall, with a big
picture window and two smaller, a mix
of cold and warmth, what with her pajamaed back, the baseboard heat,
the chill of plaster.

So safe, and yet also
an adventure.  I seemed to feel the bricks
on the other side.  I lost myself too
in the snowy roads of the Grandma Moses drapes, sleighs pulled
over the rough damask by belled horses to a honeycomb
of the same yellow-windowed house, repeated through
the fabric, red-bricked but so different
from our own. 

Maybe part of the adventure was whether my feet would leave marks,
my mother a maniac about smudges—she didn’t ever punish anyone, but to be in the same house with her when she was scrubbing was its own
kind of torture.

Oh, but I missed my mother
this morning.
 I missed her more than I would ever have believed,
 I, who knew how I loved her, missed her even more than that.

I missed her for who she was and also
just because
she was  my mother. 

I missed being a child, me who will always be
a child.

I missed being a child
with a mother beside her. 

*****************************

Kind of a draft poem. The pic, not drawn for the poem, is one from Peter Hristoff’s Inventory Drawing (at SVA.) Thank you all and have a great weekend!

This entry was posted on October 15, 2022 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.