Blame

 I am not too surprised when our oldest 

      let a wound

on her 43-year-old foot fester 

      for two months until it sagged 

to a blue mush, 
      

      until that leg was chiseled

down to half today.

Now I can’t decide whom to blame

for this latest catastrophe.  

She wasn’t dealt a good hand at birth

     my husband always said 

about her disability—this mind 

     that can’t count change,

and trusts too easily.

But I was the one who let her leave

     the board and care home to live 

with the boyfriend. 

Still, how much blame is mine when

      she kept running away

      to him anyway?

I can’t blame the boyfriend either.

     He does all the laundry, all the shopping,

all the cooking 

despite being legally blind

      and on dialysis. 

Blame isn’t black or white.

      It bleeds across a spectrum,

in pale grays and starchy whites,

      and bruised blues 

      like a rainbow.

Blame leads to talking to yourself

     and feeling stuck 

and wondering if things had gone

     better for her 

if my husband hadn’t died.

But blame is also myth-making.

     And offers second chances, ways to build

one more version

      of the past.

I don't know what to call it

 We raised him to be all he could be.

He was a boy who seemed spun from light.

A firefly caught in our hands--winning

ribbons, trophies, hearts--

as if it were all just games he was born 

knowing how to play.

He made it look so easy.

We thought he’d go far.

Maybe to the moon. Maybe past it.

We didn’t see what would catch him.

I still don’t know what it is.

The vulnerability, the break, the hidden thing.

I don’t know what to call it — 

the thing that caught him.

If I could name it, maybe I could fix it.

On my worst days, I want a reason.

Someone to blame.  A fix.

On my best days, I let the mystery be.

He’s a natural at everything that doesn’t pay.

Telling stories.

Lighting up a room.

Giving things away.

Not a natural student.

Not a natural earner.

Not a natural builder of a safe, steady life.

When he asks for money now, I say no.

I tell myself it’s for his own good.

I tell myself it’s for mine.

Tonight he texts: he’s sick.

Can’t work.

Needs food.

And my wall starts to sag.

I want to throw open the door.

I want to buy him a week’s worth of groceries, 

a year’s worth of groceries, 

the whole grocery store.

I remember the fake Christmas tree.

The way he stood there, 9 years old, begging

for a live one.

I’ll buy it myself, he said. 

For our family.

I think about his birthday money spent

on teddy bears.

One for every girl in his class.

So no one would feel left out.

I think about the boy who told me his classmate 

Robert Garcia was the best runner, best swimmer, 

best student.

And when I said,  I'm sure you’re the best 

at something, too, he grinned, I am.

I’m Robert Garcia’s best friend.

And now I don’t know if giving to him again 

saves him — or sinks him deeper.

I tell myself it’s a boundary.

I repeat it all like a prayer.

I don’t know if no is love.

I don’t know if yes is love.

I just know he’s asking.

In praise of mothers

Praise mothers who stand guard around 

the merryground of our children’s lives 

for as long as we are able. 

Praise our moods that bob up and down 

with our kids‘ own happiness 

and praise us for the love we stubbornly give 

and for all the new languages

we must learn 

to keep up 

with their evolutions

Praise us for showing up for duty 

as often as the stars

 in the Milky Way

and for seeing the light 

in our kids‘ eyes and 

helping them to dream

praise us for accepting their strange desires 

and relearning our own courage 

Praise us for letting them run barefoot 

and shirtless

For being the oar guiding their boats, 

for teaching them how to get good deals 

at the markets, obey speed limits, 

pay their bills on time 

And for not saying 

Damn I told you so when 

they fall for a scam the first time 

knowing how hard it is to live 

well in the wild

Praise us for waiting in the dark 

for them to come home from

those parties—whether or not we snapped 

Praise us for the good lies we tell them 

when they ask, Do I look fat in this suit? 

and for helping them create— like a snail

 —a protective layer

and praise us for not drowning in the sea 

of their reproaches, refusals, tantrums 

Praise us for knowing the world finds its way

in no matter what we do

Praise us above all 

for when there’s a warrant out 

for their arrest and 

we don’t erupt into flames

Praise us for tiptoeing out of their lives 

when it is time—quiet as dusk— 

but praise us--for leaving 

the porch light on.

Empty spice jars

 Tonight I drop heavy as a sack 

into a chair I love 

stained by tears 

and wine and careless 

mirth.  

My favorite chair, shaped lovingly 

by my own tentative gravity

And fix my eyes onto the night 

outside the window and

entertain the tiny thoughts 

that flutter about like fruit flies

sipping sugar from 

a memory—

Visions that stop to call 

but hurry off.  

My eyes linger on the city scape beyond and 

wonder what they are doing in those lighted worlds?

Are they content? Are their roofs caving in?

Are their spice jars empty or full?

I hug tight my qualms but know

I am blessed to have a big warm chair 

to womb me on nights like this 

when I need a mother.

The Locket

I feel guilty. 

I was going to call back J 

and K and then I was going to read 

How Minds Change 

for the new book group 

but the Lex Fridman podcast took longer than I thought 

and afterward

I put on Paul Desmond and dropped 

into my sun-licked couch and picked up 

Len Roberts’ poems. Read and read and read

because Len knows 

how to keep me alert and out of air.

Each word of his poem What the Hell 

Kicks my butt and I am as angry as he 

so I put down the book.  

No need to step further out on the ledge of suffering 

than is absolutely necessary.  

It’s sunny.  I should take a walk.  

I command myself, get up, 

my self talks back. 

Why am I so lazy? 

 

The phone dings. A text from a boyhood pal 

of my teen-man.  

In town and wants to see us.

I’m excited and slip right into old road trips 

with the boys— how I miss them and

that locket they gave me—

With a string of plastic hot dogs —it’s in a drawer 

somewhere.  

I should take it out and wear it

like a badge of honor

because teen-man is not sentimental 

so only I keep all that we have been. 

The memories spill down the hills 

right into me. 

This is my sorrow—custom-made. 

Teen-man will not even make a call.  

So as usual I tear up and text a lie 

back to his old friend.  

 

Now our old dog pees on the floor—

housebroken 12 years— and there’s blood in it.  

I stay teary. Feel like the last apple holding tight 

To the tree. 

Then the smell of skunk.  

Teen-man’s high now.  

And the rice I steamed came out dry. 

I soak it with 1/4 pound of butter 

and share it with the dog. Together 

we dine on our misfortunes.  

 

Let’s say you are the widow’s middle child

For my mother: Some stars become black holes. Others get sucked up inside them just for getting too close. --Author Kris Kidd

Let’s say you are the widow’s middle child

still in braids when you first hear

goose steps on your street.

Let’s say the last day of school the Luftwaffe

offers you a typing job, they mention travel.

Let’s say you ride in the back of a Mercedes-Benz Transformable Torpedo 

behind your boss and his driver

When the gates open and beings pour through the yard

Like rushing water, drenched as if just risen from the ocean floor.

Let’s say sleep comes and goes that night 

and the next morning you place your breakfast 

on the window sill 

and turn your back

And when you look again, the plate is gone

And you feel relief 

that a ghost has eaten 

And you are not arrested, your giving 

hand not cut off.

Let’s say the next day you repeat this act 

and later when all is over, 

in the dark of night,

You grieve because you did not do more.

And let’s say what was 

not done becomes 

the story and your life a protracted 

mourning for it, 

for what was not done.

Rising from the lawn (Mother's Day)

Because she's gone I can talk
about my mother.

I can say she was not the best
nor the worst on the spectrum.

I can say she was not really
like a mother. She was ardent

like a lover, at times
like my worst enemy.

If she were here, she would be
a 101 year old chainsmoker

with hair arrayed like a wedding
cake that would sag under her laugh.

I can say she would scold me
for being too serious and when I

complain, she’d recite an uplifting
line from a famous German sage

fortelling how people cry out
for their mothers

once they are gone
and then cast her eyes to heaven
like a wounded bird.

She would remind me how much
angst she endured for her children

and tell me again to spade her
beside my dad and to visit her there

often because it's the only way
she can rise from that silent lawn.

An act of kindness

Let's say you are the widow's middle child

still in Heide braids when you first hear 

goose steps in your town.

Let’s say fresh out of school the Luftwaffe 

offers you a good job, they mention travel. 

Let's say you ride in the back of the Mercedes-Benz

Transformable Torpedo, behind your boss

and his driver when the gates open

and transparent beings pour through the camp 

like rushing water, drenched as if they had risen

from the ocean floor.

Let's say sleep comes and goes that night and 

the next morning you place your breakfast

on the window sill and turn your back 

and when you look again the plate is gone 

and you feel relief that a ghost has eaten 

and you are not arrested, your 

giving hand not cut off. 

Let’s say the next day you repeat this act

of kindness and later when all is over, 

in the dark of night you grieve because

you did not do more. 

And let’s say what was not done 

becomes the story in your life

and your life is a protracted mourning 

for it, for what was not done. 

Chill

I couldn’t take my eyes off her face

in the bed, that silent pre-death repose.

She looks more floral than human, 

her face white as the chill before the bloom,

the skin folding scion-like around her skull, 

protecting the still living root below.

Beside her in a hard chair I watch for hours, 

day after day, my own self now shrinking 

from my dread, from my shock that this force 

(my mother was a lion) can be so undone--

the same dazed astonishment when I saw the scaffold

of a great doomed whale belly up on the sand

of Santa Cruz--a skyscraper of white bones, 

picked clean by who knows what and yet 

still mighty in grace and history.

Inside the fridge

Hunger isn't why I stand before

my mother’s fridge in my work clothes

and peer inside the vicious white light

like that laboratory I once worked in

(those skinned cats nailed to clipboards!) 

but here there's only one lump of flesh--

a chicken leg attached to a meaty thigh.

That's what I find in her fridge most 

days I visit--raw meet, an apple turnover

or two, milk and eggs, white bread.

None of which I ever eat.

It's just a habit: walk in the house, 

drop my purse on the floor, 

and look in the fridge even

though it's been 30 years since I left home

(and have my own home and fridge).

That's what a habit does to a person.

You do the same thing over and over knowing, 

maybe even hoping, the outcome 

never changes.

You just keep doing it 

because it feels so good, so right, 

because your mind can go flat and quiet, 

you can forget your cares, 

and what's better than that?

Fake

My mother calls to tell me how nice 
her flowers look in their window pots  
warm with summer sun. 

Her voice light and high--

she’s practically singing-- 
as if the sun shines on her alone.

That brave soul! Badly wounded 
but never down for long. 

Those flowers are fake!

But she loves them more for this 

very reason.
They will outlive the living blooms

that leave her to sweep up their decay 
and make her start anew. 

Much better fake! 
Durable, practical, just as lovely--
but nothing fragile flows through 
their polymer stems.

Time does not spoil their skins, 

their thorns never cut, 

she can hold in her hand a world 
without end.

Squirming

Abortion crossed her mind, my mother twists 

herself in the chair when she confesses that to me, 

her brown eyes frisking my brown eyes, 

but find no attitude, no back talk.

It does not phase me to know I might not be here, 

may have been nipped in my bud-hood. 

I feel my worth, know it was him not me

she sought escape from.

I can see her without me 

and see she would also be without them--

this sister, these brothers of mine,

the timing without me for all 

would have become altered--

other eggs would have waited and yoked, 

and then who would she be talking to now?

And would she be saying, 

You almost had an older sister? 

And me, just a tiny boney fish, 
would have lived and died in a dream 
like no other, 

but here we are, my mother laughs, 
squirming. Here we are, we two.

She had to get it all out, I understand. 

She deserves much more happiness 

and that little glob of semirigid polymer
gladly would have given 
herself up for such a worthy cause. 

Doilies

My mother leans on her walker, from her arm

dangle four knitted snowflakes.
Nice placemats! I say.

NO!...NO!! THEY ARE DOILIES! 

She shrieks as if the word placemat scalds her. 

You like them?  -- in her voice such hope.

Yes I do. Only half a lie.  
The knitting's well done, the pattern believable,
and I can feel the red in my gut.

But the snowflakes stay in the bottom 
drawer for decades

until last night when I place them 
under plates at my party. 

These doilies are lovely, someone remarks and
I want to jump from my chair and dance 
for my mother and for this guest who deserves
these doilies more than I but I just 
can't part with them. 

Hard to see

Hard to see

Gray sky, gray city, this gray hill where 

now a siren rips through fog, 

some new calamity below. 

Rain juices down my face. Hard to see a path, 

harder not to think of ash, the grave, 

harder not to look over to gray Hayward 

from this gray slope 

on Fairmont Ridge, harder 

not to think of their graves on the next hill (my mother and father)

in that muck across from Kmart, so very far from their 

birth homes, in Hayward where no one knows them, 

where they came to be less alone with each other. 

Will you ever visit our grave? asks she who hates graves 

but overcomes her animus on Christmas with a small tree 

for my father, because she honors him dead more than alive, 

because now he can do no more harm,  because death 

is a big price to pay for forgiveness.

Whenever we say goodbye

When I fly away to Europe and then to California, 
and when she comes to visit and then goes home
and any time we part and know 
it will be long till we meet again,
my mother puckers up her lips in the shape 
of a fresh spring tulip and takes my face in her hands 
to crunch my cheeks, then kisses me--
a peck really--and then, in case we never meet again, 
she tells me--to be sure I know that once 
it had been good between us-- 
You have no idea how much I loved you
when you were my little blond girl. 
She would say this, I think, because, 
since that time, so much anger had blown
between us--its slag sticking on us.
But whenever we say goodbye, it all unsticks, 
rolls down the deep well of forgotten things. 
With each farewell, there's always that sweet moment 
of two awkward souls fumbling.

I really like

I really like

when the glassy mask slips off

my mother's face,
when the snug fit around her eyes and cheeks
comes undone,
when some electrical charge snaps
and she pops from the trance
when her extended laugh flips
her head around to some inner song
and she laughs like a diva 
when her words erupt all honey lava
and her mood spumes like champagne, 
when I can hear and smell her fizz.
I really like 
when she can be happy like that.

Lime Green

It is a bleak winter night, moonless, starless, fog engulfed, 

an all embracing darkness

except the building my mother has just died in

holds fast to its lime green stain and every window 

clasps a yoke of yellow light. 

The bag they bring is black, a bleak gray scar 

runs down it. My mother, packed up like a suit.

It lifts my feet from the ground, the hair off my skin.

And then the zipper hums up the track, up, up

to her half-open eyes, her slack jaw already 

packed, then a click and a buzz and the suit’s ready

to go, to go where? 

Onto a gurney clattering to the back of a van  

waiting on the asphalt where I watch like a tree 

with its bark burned off. 

Beyond the door, a chamber of a deeper black 

than the one outside. 

This is my most unforgettable night, 

the most howling of all nights. 
Not knowing what comes next, 

no God to turn to.
My mother hurtles through the blackness
of infinity. 

Cleaning up

I step into the house my mother was carried out of 

but expected to return to in a day or so

(after all, it was only a fall in this hallway 

that made mosaic of her leg).

I can't explain how I sense what I know can't be true

that there are others here moving around me 

gently as jelly fish,

but not confined to any space, 

being supernal.

Though it's already noon, all the rooms 

have the feel of first morning light, 

when dawn lines the edges of the visible, 

stepping hushed out of the invisible, 

a parallel world ready to appear, 

the realm I once knew at St Joseph's, 

the realm of blood miracles and incorruptible bodies.

Walking through her house, I feel her eyes 

on my back. She is curious: what of hers 

will I take home, which belongings will be let go,

her motive being to understand what I love about her. 

I command my eyes to take their sweet time, 

to dwell on her dolls and her florentine hat 

with equal ardor 

so as not to insult my mother any further 

by rejecting her possessions. 

Mamatschi

She sings that song to me again, in German

( I’d rather be alone but I listen)

about a boy who begs his mamma for a horse

(Mamatschi, shenk mir ein Pferdchen)

Mamatschi, a pony would be my paradise.

Her voice scales the ceiling, trilling:

One day there stood four jeweled mares 

before the house

--and here she comes apart, 

her voice on the floor in pieces: 

Oh Mamatschi, funeral horses I did not want!

My mother, that ungifted singer, 

that unbashful lover of sappy songs.

I'm listening

Come, she rolls her eyes toward her bedroom

and shuts the door.
We sit side by side on the bed and I sink 
into her force and fold my hands in my lap. 
My mother wants to talk about the war again
away from my father’s ears.
Today it’s Bucharest where a gypsy unfolds
my mother’s palms on the table and reads 
each line as if it were a highway with a clear 
white line straight into the future.
You will marry a foreigner, you will never be happy. 
My mother falls silent in the story, I see no 
movement in her eyes, she has left me on the bed 
and she is standing at that little table in Romania 
staring at her young pink palms, 
her feminine fingers, those manicured nails 
trained to pluck a violin, 
wondering how could these hands forsake her?
For years, the war hovers around my mother. 
For years she sits in dark rooms with eyes closed. 
I want to ask about the foreigner in the next room
but she holds one index finger to my face. 
Please, no questions.