8.25.13 After the Visit

 

  

None of it was mine; that much I understood

from small childhood, it was all

hers-  my arms, my legs, my

dreams, my friends, my

waking moments, my

long brown braids; it was never mine, nor my

birthday, not my breakfast, ever my

sleep, nor my bedroom, not

one of me was

mine

And every morning with all those little brothers

and one big one she would

rip through my hair with a

comb, not a brush, pulling

down through the tangles of my

ancient, distressed sleep as she

Slipped elapsed knots from the

teeth of the comb as I

stood before her, obedient

my head pulled this way

and yanked that way as I

now and then dared an

“Ow!”, to her “It doesn’t HURT” and then

waited until the tight

tugs of my hair were

plaited, trained 
into Rapunzel’s 
stretching , quieted
down down

the length of  my own young

spine

Until one day at a

visit to grandparents, the

father’s parents we

hardly saw, when my

Grandmother, quiet and

Tall and elegant did

enter the room where I

sat only with my grandfather who

brought me to the beach just to

watch the waves and

sent me magazines about

writing , somehow knowing, and

one day a straw tourist hat with small

objects upon it that

made my eyes smile as we held

hands

She came upon us it was

not the dusk with the

hammock beneath scrub pines

the evening’s cranberry juice before us ; she

cocked her head, so easily bruised, and said

“Do you really want those

braids?”

Years later we all went, when she

sat in a chair, dying, the

doctors telling her it was

all in her mind the long

progressive abandonment of

all of her movements when

Lou Gehrig’s story

had not yet been

told

After she died my

small quiet grandfather

sat in the new home that she

built for a hobby

right next door and his

heart  became filled with 

boll weevils his

mind cantilevered his

hands wrung themselves raw then he

somehow found a gun and one day

put it neatly to his

head

But after the visit, long before,

I returned back home and

scrutinized my braided friends-

"Who can sit on her hair?" " Ha!

Mine is longer! " And I

turned to my mother, said

in front of her friends

“I would like to cut my

hair.”