sours like a land
fill, scent discarding
broken art
if facts
seem hat-
red, like old dye
in book bindings held in
Grandmothers' hand
burgundy, stains mine,
these wells,
deep dug of others land
while scouring an hour springs salt,
dehydrates
perched
morn.
My Grandmothers both read poetry to me. One Grandmother loaned me a book that I took to school and, at recess, kept carefully by the parking lot curb, returning to it, to read and see its illustrations. Those poems were exhilarating and illustrated with a savage grace exotic! My other grandmother had many books of poetry, collections of various poets' writings. Having loved one poem, I loved many and read more than I could possibly keep close.
Today, after having watched a YouTube video performance from 1967 or 1976—I should mind those numbers—of Emily Dickinson's life dramatized in The Belle of Amherst, I sobbed so much that I felt hatred and anguish for both of my grandmothers having introduced me to poems and poets and poetry. (I am 45; friends, please do not take me to task for these feelings, thank you.)
After years of collecting heavier feelings and not being able to dislodge most of them, (including a paperback book one grandmother had of the atrocity called Helter Skelter that I read one summer as a young person), and including the many Saturday afternoons fascinated with Shock Theatre and Vincent Price, and including the daytime TV series of The Munsters and The Adams Family, I am whittled through with corrosion. I feel it. And once magnetized to attract horrific humor or true pathos, spiritually drawn, I have a work to do every day, dredging these stains out and finding fresh water to keep me alive and clear.
Pathos is glorious, but not when it keels youth and thought and over-burdens bright gifts.
I do not hate my grandmothers, not at all. I bless them. Both loved me and held me and read to me and laughed and taught me about life in the way they experienced it. However punctuated it came, there was grace in both of my grandmothers. And I am grateful for that first view of poetry, or rather, the SECOND view of it in the book lent me at recess.
And, may I be late to say it, my grandmother with the many volumes lived long enough for me to be in her life and love her in ways that I could. The grandmother who lent her book to me, who played in unexpected ways, and who sewed Barbie doll wardrobes along the lines of Dior Himself or Valentino, I loved her as a child loves—mostly admiration and awe for her beauty and expert hygiene, her smile, her colorful, tailored clothes, her quiet, surprising laughter, her rioting ideas for play contrasted by one flavor of ice cream in her freezer: vanilla, maybe French vanilla, but just that. That was a shocking purity to my young self. My other grandmother sewed home items and simple dresses and wore multiple strands of beads, and smelled always of the fragrance Heaven Scent. She quoted scriptures to me when I was a young mother. She was a southern cook with an old-world Virginia-soft voice that could never go so high as a wail, but just climbed the scales if her temper got rowdy. Her face would redden and she would purse her lips and move quickly to some loving, domestic task, like dumplings or sweet-smelling laundry for the line to dry. Both of my grandmothers gave birth to my parents. I am so thankful to be given life and to be given time as an adult to grow up again and again, clearing walkways that become strewn as the sky and trees lessen their burdens.
Posted by nancy at February 26, 2014 09:33 AM