Mother's Day
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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