As a freshman in college, I was required to write an analysis of Henry Reed’s poem, Naming of Parts. Throughout different periods in my life I have been reminded of that poem. Certainly, the tumultuous years of the 1960’s and early 1970’s were periods when the distinct anti-war sentiment of this World War II era poem resonated with the events unfolding at that time and with my own personal life as I served as a conscientious objector in opposition to the war in Vietnam. However, this morning, Reed’s poem penetrated my consciousness in an altogether different light. Around midnight the vale of calm that had descended over me was torn away by the ring tone of my cell phone. As I catapulted from my bed and fumbled in the darkness for the phone, I exhaled in resignation to receive the words I had hoped I would never hear: Tommy, mom passed away just before quarter of twelve, my sister sobbed. The air was heavy, burdensome even in its life-giving properties; pathos rather than oxygen enriched it so that breathing was living and drowning, a vortex of light and water, an embrace of loss and love, of bondage and freedom. She slipped away as I slept.
Morning brings renewal whether or not we approve; it brings a perspective that we may accept or reject but it always provides us with a moment of innocence, a moment in which all that ever was can be remade in an inexplicable alliance of possibilities. We cannot undo what has come to pass or unhook the world from its orbit; we cannot perform a cosmological legerdemain and revivify the matter which has spent itself or master the soul’s surcease with an esoteric alchemy. Life begets death and death begets life, a tarantella we must all dance and, none or few of us, depending on one’s perspective, ever master.
I found myself strangely like the daydreaming student in Reed’s poem, gazing out on an imaginary Eden, constructing a haven of memories as the world droned on about the parts of its machinery, ineluctably, mechanically, methodically, routinely–dentist appointments, dental insurance claims, car inspections. What war demands is fomented from genius which has not bridled passion to bear witness to love; and, instead, sees itself as the object of all affections. Breaking down a rifle is not a paradigm for a life, not even if my mother, was by some reckoning, a cocked, Sicilian pistol; however, the process by which we compartmentalize a life may very well differ only in the naming of the parts: she was born on… her parents were… married on.. she worked for… retired… is survived by her husband… her children… her grandchildren… her great grandchildren… family will receive at… in lieu of flowers…
In my reverie I construct a thousand scenes, all of which paint her differently, portray her with loving tenderness but do not censor the salty repartee with which she could deflate the puffiest ego–mine was not exempt and suffered an occasional bruise as I tumbled from an untenable and precarious perch. When we draw near as friends and family to pay our respects, to honor her life, to share our memories, try as we might, there will remain an emptiness within the fullness of our remembrances for as the poet reminds us of the fragility of balance: for this we have not got.
While I wrote this poem nearly a decade ago on mother’s day, it remains faithful to the life and spirit of my mother, the indecipherable bond between parent and child, the inextinguishable flame which is implicit and guides us in all of our journeys.
Millennial Mother’s Day
I dialed several times before you answered
and several more before I got the number
right.
Hello
the voice as distant as it was dulcet
labored from years stashed away
like pennies in those glass bottles
lurking in the corners and dark places
of your rooms with their thin necks
stretched like cranes swallowing fish.Of course you were surprised,
sometimes, the voice eludes you,
runs behind your memory like
the child you recall used to play
hide and seek beneath the street
lamps poking holes in summer nights.Hi Mom, happy mother’s day.
How are you? Our conversations
have the regularity of our age,
spaced as the years increase,
they have become brief but epic
paeans to codify our strange chronology.I’m OK. My back hurts when I lift
anything; walking’s hard but I
ain’t getting no operation on my back
at my age. The time in between my calling
sheds all forms of mechanism. There is no longer
any duty left, no rancor at being forgotten,
at least in my own tightly spinning universe,
until the next time I tap out the number
of my home, by rote and heart. She answers
if she’s there
and if she has made the trip
to her Mecca by the sea, Atlantic City, balancing
bouncing bus rides and the kalaediscope
of neon lights, spinning wheels, and the incubi
who whisper hoarsely to her of precious maps
to unimaginable fortune; or weighing how much
flesh she has left to barter for this respite
which requites the sacrifice of youth made
much too soon; he answers. Lucid now
when medicated, strong & powerful in my
memory of him. I see him mostly this way;
weak only when I measure my own fragility
against the encroaching ages of my children.But she is there this time and we pause,
a reflection of distance and resignation
rushes by like a pleasant memory
which distracts but does not color
itself with time or place or people.
Our voices evoke an unspoken trace
of parent, child; something lingers,
her heartbeat in her breath, the young
woman in photographs, the rasp of
tobacco and hot nights of shift work
in factories since she left high school,
a girl’s dreams of field hockey exchanged
too prematurely for the secrets of adults,
something palpable that cannot be bound
with words.
