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An Elegy For The Complication She was more than just sinew and gristle, two red sticked lips a towering soprano from five feet of feminine, the angle between angel and devil less than ninety degrees, and humidity its equal. much more. but there are no questions allowed in this class, son, sit down and eat your peas, there are children in Dehli, New, and that’s your problem: go solve it. above the refrigerator she hid the oil. this was no altar wine, nor was it sipped. but that was later, after the emptiness filled her with such grief that vodka is no different than valium for some, and for her it was relief from that and him. by the time we were able to piece all of this together, parts lost, parts hidden showing up at all hours, in the mail, on the floor, by phone, no instructions from anyone, for anyone, reconstruction of a jigsaw puzzle by the blind began, and continues to this day, unabated and abetted by allegiance, filial, familial, sincere yet as much out of self-preservation as indulgence of curiosity – which felled the feline. so in our days of remorse, after the cancer was discovered, treated: here one takes a deep breath and remembers the words, the verbs, the adjectives and adverbs forgotten, exactly, but noted as they burn in the firepits of our hearts, for they burn on the ash of morphine and mortician, on hair collected at a chance brushing of her scalp just prior to the priest’s blessing, the rosary strangling her as she struggled for air in the last minutes of her longest hour. the five children pulling together, dividing the spoils: a chair here, a hooked rug there, ear rings, gold chains, a favorite photograph, the chest of drawers that held us, held our kindergarten projects and report cards, the toothy smiles of fifth graders brightly burning their way down into the midst of the stack of Halloween and Christmas art projects that somehow survived four decades of family decadence as if revisionism had already been anticipated. See: you never could draw! And in amongst the orts, the wheat, the chaff, a third-grader’s first poem to his God. Something about sleeping in peace knowing He was there. Death had not entered third grade poetry. There is life, and love and parents who love one another for that life, and Jesus and Mary and Grandma. It takes years of news, stock losses and relations with others to create real modern poets. Then we can open the can with a knife and sit by the campfire and cook beans that give you gas, and regularity, and we can reminisce about the days when it was easy. She is gone, and it is not easy to forget when I look out over the gray lake from my deck and think how she would have set herself down in a chair with a blanket and a book or her latest rug and worked without a sound for an hour or even two and would have said at some point that she was happy for me to have such a view and to be able to share it with her before – she got tired and had to go. But I catch myself before too long and smile at my lack of ability to make her go away completely, which of course I don’t really want to do but figure I might do if I didn’t see her anymore, which I don’t, not in the usual sense of seeing, like I see the sun shining off the lake like a picture in Look, which she liked and often bought from Jim’s Red Owl (they deliver), but in the sense that you see what I’m saying, don’t you. So that's about it; that's who she is, or was; and if those two tenses imply differences, that is only the difference between seeing her through this lens, it capturing and storing as memories and memoir the story of her life - and this Look Magazine version of it, a sun low on the lake, a windless gray lake where we might sit watching it set, sipping a wine, and not talking about anything, or anyone, we really loved. That is the difference. |
This Poem was Critiqued By: Thomas H. Smihula On Date: 2007-12-06 08:22:47
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 9.91667
Thomas,
What I like about this piece is a picture of life and the ups and downs, the memories and thoughts held within. Story of this life is shown by the words and does keep the reader into the piece. This reader did at times have difficulty with the format that runs together making the reader force the pause that would enhance the delivery. Just this readers opinion. Thanks for sharing a life. Thomas