asked me to put a lifetime of artwork online,
I had no words, the sheer volume of her need
to express herself in music and poetry,
coupled with her many breaks from reality,
filled every nook and cornice of the old trailer.
Some poems were scribed in a secret language.
The idea of a universal tongue to unite us all.
I humored her, scanning boxes of artwork,
everything in triptych, a gathering of the tribes
of music, art and poetry.The mystic Indo European three.
I leaned on the impromptu desk like a chanteuse,
a sleek baby grand piano filled the living room,
as she tamed a half-lifetime of work into submission,
the urge to preserve posterity, the urgency for audience
taking precedence over everything, even eating.
For months we sorted art. It morphed into shared meals,
then cleaning the house as her eyesight was dimming.
She couldn’t see the grime in the kitchen or bathroom.
Sometimes she’d stop to read a poem aloud. And cackle.
Each piece triggering a memory, windows to the past.
She rendered her artistic life into an endgame
for her children who didn’t want this crazy old lady
as the idea of mother. Yet she nurtured us, it was in her nature.
And she waited for her intergalactic friends—who were coming.
Why didn’t I believe, she asked, in a querulous voice,
bitter with the suppressed rage of years of living alone,
and familial neglect, and the purgatorial isolation of Covid.
As she read poems, it hit me, her invented language was phonetic.
Her intergalactic friends were coming, she again assured me.
She left manifestos on the counter as if to convince me,
So like my own crazy mother, I thought. The same vision.
A distant shore of a country I would never set foot upon.
And then one day there was a bilingual sign taped
on the sliding glass door bidding her friends welcome.
I never saw her again, the family closed ranks. Held vigil.
L. said she couldn’t get out of bed, she didn’t want to linger
not like her bedridden mother who lingered decades, she said.
So Barb, who didn’t want to be a burden in her old age,
simply quit eating, she turned her head to the wall, and died.
All this, I found out later, when I saw her blue sofa
beached like flotsam by the side of the road.
4/21 Write On! Susie Terence
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