For hours my mother hovered over us,
her hand gently guiding mine, her wrist
a helm for my unsteady ship.
I knew how to hold a pencil,
how to grip it between my thumb
and pointer finger, how to lean softly
to avoid a callus. I knew how to form
all my letters perfectly before starting school.
For every birthday, a new notebook
would appear wrapped tightly with a bow.
I would bury my nose inside it
as if the pages would write themselves
with my breath. The pages I’d fill with words
my young tongue was too knotted to express.
—Tiana Nobile
From Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). Reprinted with permission of the poet.
What does it feel like when you are in fourth grade
and your mom gets cancer?
It feels like that day I brought my Snoopy
lunchbox to school, the yellow plastic one
that snapped closed with a click,
got left on the playground, forgotten.
The next morning that playground was covered
with shards of yellow plastic.
What else can you do but bring your lunch in brown paper bags
for the rest of the year
for the rest of every school year to come
and pretend you like it that way.
We’ve gathered on the dock. Mother wears a custom-made suit, bold black and white checks, the skirt fitted tight. My sister and I teeter beside her, two untethered buoys, dresses buoyant in the breeze. With her hand shading her eyes, Mother watches the ship, a sailing city crowded with waving couples against a white, white exterior. Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage, we cry to friends of Mother’s, the wife barely recognizable beneath a veiled hat. Corks burst from champagne bottles; shrieks as the bubbling liquid pours over hands and arms. After the ship retreats with an exaggerated Honk, we huddle in the back seat of the car. Let’s pretend we’re sleeping on the ship’s deck chairs, we whisper, and imagine the evening growing colder. Clinging together, our shivering bodies wrapped in widely striped towels. Two girls alone on a boat, the water black and rushing past, lips salty.
—Tina Barry
From Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Reprinted with permission of the poet.
Nudged awake,
in the still-dark morning,
by the sound of her shower’s rainfall—
I’d drag my aqua comforter to the toast-colored carpet
outside Mom’s bathroom. I’d drop the heap
and loll in the folds,
watching mist rise
from the slit of light beneath the door.
Before the tap of words was opened,
I’d ease into the school day,
inhaling her drugstore citrus,
and listening to the downpour
break on her first.
I imagine when she
shot the raccoon
as it drank the tepid
mid-day rain
from my brothers’
kindergarten-colored,
water-dotted
plastic play set,
she used the sun’s
ray as a scope,
the weight of
my pudgy infant brother
pulling tight like a sling
on her arm, another son
clinging to her calves,
clamping her to the earth
with the steadying force
of ten toddler fingers
as she slid open
the screen door, pointed
the barrel at the backyard menace
and pulled the trigger
just once,
without ceremony
without raising her
blood pressure,
heart rate, eyebrow-simply
disappearing the problem
as if she was smoothing
the wrinkles of a sheet.
—Shannon Curtin, from Motherland
Anchor & Plume Press. Used by permission of the poet.
What if the only way
she could write again
required a white cup
3
And the cup,
would she pour herself
into it? Or, rather, bring it to her lips.
4
What if
5
What if she held the cup very close,
by its delicate white handle,
and whispered into the hollow.
6
Something like—
I was five, and he said pick mulberries with me;
I could show you the tree
on which they weep and sway.
And her mother held her chin
and said, tell him no…
it would spoil your hand-sewn dress.
A poem can sing to you, even if you don’t totally “get” it or enjoy every line.
“Piano,” by D.H. Lawrence, is not one of my overall favorite poems. It’s not a bad poem, of course, and I can’t pretend to even approach Lawrence’s levels of literary influence in my lifetime. However, references to “weeping” and “floods of remembrance” don’t grip me in the same way as precise, sensory details that invite me weep and remember. Which is precisely why this poem sticks with me.
In the first stanza, a woman’s voice seeps through the dusk like the soft, remaining glow of light. The speaker, drawn into this beauty, experiences an out-of-body memory and imagines himself as a child many years ago.
The next two lines are what grab me:
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings/And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
What I love about this memory is the full sensory appeal of it, especially the sense of touch. I feel the vibration of the strings under the piano–both the “boom” of the bass notes and the strains of the “tingling strings,” words whose similar sounds cause the music to tremble under my own skin. The tender detail of the child “pressing the small, poised feet” of his mother is just unusual enough to make the scene real to me. Specific is universal. I can imagine a child touching his mother’s feet because of my own children, who affectionately tug my sweater sashes, knee me in the butt, or whack my head with coloring books.
In Everything That Makes You Mom, author Laura Lynn Brown asks readers to recall memories of their mothers in specific situations, such as concocting treats in the kitchen, driving, playing, or tending plants. By imagining and recording these scenes in writing (remember, imagining is image-ing), readers not only reward themselves with rich pictures from the past but can give their mothers the invaluable gift of showing how they noticed things all those years.
My mom is not a musician. She’s creative, yes, but as a master quilter, builder of Victorian dollhouses, and any other task requiring an eye for detailed design. The images of my mother embroidering calico brown wedding rings and laying tiny shingles one by one on gabled roofs will never leave me. But these wonders were wrought in her own private moments as I stood in the background. We did share some important times together, however. And they did not take place alongside a musical instrument, easel, or Great American Novel.
Every Saturday night, during my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s, my mom and I watched The Love Boat while sharing a one-pound bag of M&Ms. We weren’t the snuggliest family in the world, but once a week we put our feet up, threw comforters over our legs, and huddled with a bag of candy between us.
Of course The Love Boat was not a masterpiece. Plot lines were predictable and corny. Charo was a frequent guest star. But it was “our thing.” In fact, one year my mom gave me a sterling silver heart necklace to commemorate our sweet ritual, and even when I returned from college on the weekends, years after The Love Boat went off the air, I would find a large bag of M&Ms awaiting me on my bed.
As a mother, I wonder what close moments my children will remember. Hugging my son as I walk into his first-grade classroom as a volunteer? Squeezing through clothing racks with my oldest daughter at the mall? Lying next to my middle daughter as she paints watercolor flowers while on her bed? (Yep. I’ve decided to let her paint in bed.)
A whole poem can capture you, each word catching more and more of your breath until you’re dizzy with wonder. Sometimes just part of a poem does it: a stanza, line, or word. This is what “Piano” has done for me, releasing my own, okay, I’ll say it—flood of memories.
Give every poem a chance to explore you. You’ll never know what will sing.
Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
