Classic Poem

At moments almost thinking of her, I was
moving through the still life show while my mother
had her stroke. She was teaching someone, three
times zones away, to peel and slice
a banana, in the one correct way,
and I was with the little leeks,
near the sweated egg, near the newts quick
and the newts gone over on their backs. An orange
trailed from its shoulders the stole of its rind,
the farther from the tree the more thinged and dried,
the wasp was done with one sable guard-hair
in oil that had ground gold in it. She had
alerted me, from the start, to objects, she'd cried
out, in pain, from their shining. She held the
banana and lectured like a child professor on its
longitudes and divisible threes,
she raised her hands to her temples, and held them,
and screamed, and fell to her bedroom floor, and I
wandered, calm, among oysters, and walnuts,
mice, apricots, coins, a golden
smiling skull, even, a wild flayed
hare strung up by one foot like a dancer
leaping, I strolled, ignorant
of my mother, among the tulips, beetles in their
holy stripes, she lay while I walked
blind through music. When I learned her spirit
had left her body while I was immersed
in pretty matter, I almost felt something had
served her right — what my mother had thought
when her mother had died, what I'd comforted her for thinking.
Once, in that comfort, I saw my face over her
shoulder, in a gilded mirror.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 185, no. 5, Feb. 2005. Used with permission.