The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Michele Rappoport
I want to write a book someone wants to burn
she tells me on her last day. I squeeze her hand and tell a lie so big it can be seen from space. It’s never too late, I say even though I know the meds, looming large now inject themselves into everything she says, does, won’t even let her use her phone. Who is this fiery stranger? Certainly not my mother, gentle as the cats she rescued, rebellious only in her wild hair, and now, not even that, I think, as I stroke the strands slicked straight back and tight as skin, a nursing home convenience. I search her expressionless face and find it’s mine that’s changing, remembering the obscenities of a sanctioned life. The smoke wafting thoughtlessly from my father’s pipe into her post-tubercular lungs. The silence from his end of the table or the harsh word that screamed like a missile across the turbulent air. Those days when she lay on her unmade bed, head heavy on her pillow, hair greased roughly in the shape of her last salon set. Fire gone. And now, perhaps, Prometheus in a hospital gown fighting to steal it back? Housekeeping comes in and starts to clean her rolling bedside table where she play-eats meals, the hanging TV, the strip of fluorescent sun. I reach into my pocket and pull out a rock from my garden, a pretty one, polished on my wheel, and place it in her hand. She looks at me and starts to cry. Is this what you think of me? And now I’m crying too, though I swore I wouldn’t and swat at a fly I miss again and again and think of the insects she killed for me summers before A/C and the rec room floor sweating from condensation and every creeping thing skittered across the cool gray tiles. This is what I remember after she sleeps and I walk the white halls, leaving her alone, the fly buzzing still, dodging the burning wish, the hurtful rock, the bug brown smear of death. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |