old poems

DISENTANGLE

ONE
I am an orphan.
The mother
who raised me
died in the spring, confident,
when I'd turned forty,
I could lead my life alone.
Then I buried her
overtop the grave of a brother I'd not met,
the one she "lost"
in an age of silence
when no one spoke of such things.

Not buried so much as scattered her,
tore back sod,
spread ashes under roots,
set a small plaque engraved with facts,
placed sacred objects around edges of the scar:
rolled in marbles for the boy,
shook cigarettes for the old woman,
offering tobacco for spirits of prairie
asleep along the South Saskatchewan River.
Mother in dirt
under sod
in the same city where she'd adopted me
forty years before.

TWO
My original mother-gene pool
chose to give me away,
lost me
rather than independence,
a choice I would have made.

She had audacity,
survived a family of twelve
worked as a waitress
laid with a boy who disappeared
into blonde prairie, with his blonde hair
and his white face
reddened with sunshine
ran away,
from her
soft curves, blue eyes liquid
dark, round brown nipples
hardened by hot breezes,
summer's sunsoft smell of fresh cut greenfeed,
waves of wheat,
stooks.
Behind a truck stop
north of where he went
to help with harvests,
he sowed seed
to grow as me.
She left me
in a place to be found
by a woman robbed of a son.

Another family of mother, aunts, uncles
lives close to this city
where my mother sleeps.

THREE
I can see ...
brother's playing marbles
mother's rolling tobacco around the corners of her mouth
wishing for winter to end
spirits on the grave
wanting to break up through the thin soil
into air
into sunlight
through energy in grassy stalks
waving
after snow is melted
and ice disappears from underneath
before the first Friday morning
in each summer month
when a groundskeeper cuts unmarked graves
perpetually careful.

FOUR
Would this unknown brother
trapped underground dead before living
have grown to be a man like that harvester,
Sniffing after cunt and fearing it, flee?

I suspect
Her son would have been a soldier
like her brother
in the Scottish graveyard she and I walked,
or near killed by stones falling
when the earth shook
while he dug resting places
for others.
What would a brother have done?

Saved me

FIVE
My mother's ashes live inside me
colour my life grey
fertilize my dreams with images forgotten or imagined
of youth, health,
when I stood knee high between her and husband
holding hands
in the sun
on a beach in California
gawking at the ocean
me fearful
waves would wash away

my adopted happiness.

Grey turned fog.
In a Scottish evening
she showed me the graveyard
and we wandered in a mist
looking for ancestors.
Her anger at her body
betrayer, slipped into helplessness
with disease -
diabetes sapped all her blood sugar
made her crazy / or
cancer zapped all her energy
took away breast, liver, spine -
dignity
her fist slapped
into her open hand
knotted with arthritis
anger had no words,
coloured red black, burnt to grey piles of ash
choke insides, tear apart control.
Grey hair soft in the dying light of her last day
pillow sweat dampened her forehead,
struggling to understand
the goodbyes.
Grey sky of a cool afternoon of bagpipes
lamenting with her community,
witness a slow march of pallbearers to her memorial,
grey hair of all the women
who shared her life.

SIX
I might have been
raised with stooks and truck stops.
Would I be wife, farmer, mother,
daughter still?
Or could I have been who I am
lover, traveler, reader
lesbian still?
Nature and nurture
turned; mobius
another path
another passed,
a mother's death,
her daughter's life.

Alive loving women
centred on women
Mothers(') influences, lovers choices
nature's direction,
magnetic north my compass points
unwaver no mat(t)er
which way I turn, women pull me
direction set, path followed, joy taken
stripped, whelmed.

SEVEN
I got a few letters in the mail
from Scotland
after the first Christmas,
forwarded from mother's mailbox
wondering why they'd not had a letter.

Months later I hadn't answered
half afraid to make real
death that lived inside me
by telling someone else the truth,
sharing memories of her.
Revealing
more of her every day,
darkened mirrors in me,
sharpened truth's echoes.

To begin that letter to them -
"It is with real deep sadness..."
from a heart full of tears
or from a joyful place that celebrates
an end of suffering?
Grief floods holes,
eats through walls,
barricaded doors,
into prickly territory with
perimeters marked and channels explored
a core / coeur / corps
cultural expos - eh
This place I live safely
where she lives, loving me.

Written 1991