Sunday, August 25, 2013

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.”

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