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A POEM IN ONE PLACEWhere do I go for a poem?Where is one place? Where does the great poem live? My mother slid down abruptly, getting stuck on her couch, unable to get up; Dee's husband John said she's got to go to the hospital. The rest of us knew she needed to stay at home. A poem came from Marguerite and Mae sitting with her first one day, then two, making my mother that awful cereal she liked so much with oatmeal, bran, yogurt and banana. From her long couch, she told them what to do, women who had coffee and danish and didn't keep bran in the house. She thanked them, too weak to stand. The place for a poem is in the pain patch that sent her into memories of me in college, as she told Ed, a neighbor who sat with her for another day. The aide who called to tell me she had just died, and the friend who stayed with us while we decided whether to leave that night or the next day made a place for this poem. The place where this poem came from is the same place where my mother sat reading a mystery novel. It is the same place dreams come from and the only place we went, needing to be alone, but never naming it. Sometimes I hear crickets when in that place, sometimes I'll put my feet in a stream, sometimes a Greek man will laugh and twirl me around saying it's never too late to dance, and the villagers will toast me with retsina. I am not too fat for them. Your hands are like my daughter's hands, he tells me softly. He brings me a rosewater candy, a lace flower, and a brass candlestick. |
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Issue #19, March, 2001 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.