Force of Circumstance
My mother crossed out whole passages
of love letters, cut away inscriptions in books,
preferring scars to the potential harm
of intimacy. Now at seventy, she confides
over the phone, It wasn't worth it, so I know
she thinks I'm dying.
My ninth day in the hospital, she called
the surgeon at his house, told him he better
figure something out, to stop my kidney
bleeding, then she goes on to say how, in Detroit,
she stayed up scribbling poems, furiously,
in the night kitchen, writing and eating puffed rice,
while our bottles boiled.
I remember the Smith Corona my father bought
for her birthday, and I played with—carriage
return like a rifle shot, strategic upside-down,
backward, paper insertion, black superball
rubber roller, and keys that locked midair
in words I believed were code.
She preferred scrawling her looping lines on scrap
pads, envelopes, my father's defunct business
letterhead. Her "box of papers" followed us
from house to house, found its final rest behind
the padlock of her condo bedroom closet.
She says over the phone, I've thought it over,
for the past fifteen years or so, and realize they
were just for me. Then she adds, I could still
crank out a few poems, as if bargaining for my life,
or her own.
Published in Burden of Light, Fast Forward, 2014
