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Poem

I bought my house for its mirrored walls 
in the master bath from which you could fancy 
yourself as a forties' film star, your flawless 
body soaking in billowing suds, or stepping into 
a glassed-in shower, large enough for a tryst 
with Tarzan, be he resident of a nearby tree.  

I imagined Don Perignon cooling in a basin, 
and me: Maureen Sullivan, with or without an 
Ape Man, poised for my swinging life, coupe 
in hand. Instead, stumbling in half-light toward 
morning ablutions on the quotidian blank page 
of my life, mirrors conjured up not Hamlet's 
perturbed, parental spirit, but a woman with my 

mother's face.  In her summer frock, frenzied 
with flowers, prim white hat, and a crocheted bag 
in the crook of her arm, she is standing on 
the sidewalk outside my grandmother's white-
columned house in Georgia, where she sought 
safe haven before a failed life, Jack Daniels 
whiskey, and the cancer monster claimed her.

"So easy to spoil" it was said, so how is it life did 
not work for her? -- "My beautiful, beautiful 
daughter, wailed my grandmother like a banshee, 
she, of the stiff, upper-lipped Prussian forbears, 
as we drove forty solemn miles to lay her favorite 
in Rebel heaven alongside a great-grandfather who 
lost an arm at the battle of Cold Springs, his 
grim-faced wife, bedrock beside him.

Peace was the prize my mother never won, 
no treaty ever offered, pardon long in coming.  
I see her poised like a dancer, sad history 
surrounding her, a smile as unreadable as Mona 
Lisa's under eyes like mine that have seen too 
much of the sorrow of this world.  "It all 
comes down to this," Anne Sexton wrote, "We 
ARE our mothers--that's the main thing."

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