Mama, It Was Too Late

My Mother Turns Fifty (published in Third Wednesdsay Poetry Journal)

It is a sunny afternoon, the light

coming in yellow through her curtains

that cut through the smoke.

Cat Stevens feels like water inside my soul

and then she switches it to Bread

and hands me a dust rag.

I dance across the green and brown

carpet squares; I wipe the hazy walls, the stiff

yellow furniture with the green and gold flowers;

Me, Amy Jo, in 1984

speakers as tall as I am:

it is 1984 and I am my mama’s bumble bee; I shine everything

everything is for her.

She is young and beautiful and lauging;

this is the age I wanted to be her–chain-smoking Dorals

and sipping black coffee, no men for us, no fathers, no drunks

She tells me to get dirty but stay in the yard as she

folds freshly washed laundry from the Good Will.

I see her always moving, and I was a part of that motion,

that current,

that music like water.

I used to find my gravity in her eyes

Not this woman

with

this stare,

this woman

who wrings

Time-Travel by Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time-Travel     —Sharon Olds

 

 

I have learned to go back and walk
around

and find the windows and doors.
Outside

it is hot, the pines are black, the
lake

laps.  It is 1955 and I am

looking for my father.

I walk from a small room to a big
one

through a doorway.  The walls and floors are
pine,

full of splinters.

I come upon him.

I can possess him like this, the
funnies

rising and falling on his big
stomach,

his big solid secret body

where he puts the bourbon.

He belongs to me forever like
this,

the red plaid shirt, the baggy
pants,

the long perfectly turned
legs,

the soft padded hands folded across his
body,

the hair dark as a burnt
match,

the domed, round eyes
closed,

the firm mouth.  Sleeping it
off

in the last summer the family was
together.

I have learned to walk

so quietly into that summer

no one knows I am there.  He
rests

easy as a baby.  Upstairs

mother weeps.  Out in the
tent

my brother reads my diary.  My
sister

is changing boyfriends somewhere in a
car

and down by the shore of the lake there is a
girl

twelve years old, watching the
water

fold and disappear.  I walk up behind
her,

I touch her shoulder, she turns her
head–

I see my face.  She looks through me,

up at the house.  This is the one I
have

come for.  I gaze in her eyes, the
waves,

thick as the air in hell, curling
in

over and over.  She does not
know

any of this will ever stop.

She does not know she is the
one

survivor.

Small Parts (2)(excerpts from a work-in-progress)

a possible insert to “Small Parts”  

            To a little girl, his face was the moon.  He had a big chin like that, and a heavy forehead that shadowed his large, lashless eyes.  In later years, the years where he sat around a lot and stared from his recliner into the wall, or into corners, or out the window, his eyes developed this film over them that made it look like he was crying all the time.  I pretended he was, to find significance.  I imagined those red-rimmed, swimming eyes shrunk in on themselves because he saw me—damaged—before I even knew it.  He saw my future breakdown in the very manner I fought against him and my mother.  I was stubborn.  I was a burier.  I’d dig forever to retrieve my parts, because they were mine.  But those eyes, in the early years, shone clear with one of three states: personal satisfaction, witty sarcasm, or white anger—when all’s you could make out when you turned your head to see how far back he was from you were his pupils inside wide, white circles.  When you’re a child, you’re a fool to run, but it’s instinct.  And when you can’t run anymore, you run inside, stride for stride, etching scars across your psyche like ice-skating. 

            To a little girl, his very presence was an odd curiosity.  No hands-down, palms-up.  Hands belonged in pockets or around newspapers or cigarettes.  He had a strut that made his stiff blue jeans make a “whisk” sound.  He wore shiny, black boots.  I never saw black so shiny.  I loved to watch him polish them.  I’d sit closer than my sisters dared so I could breathe in that polish smell.    

—stuck here, come back to it

(fast-forward)

            It was just after the climax of the spoken (and lied about) betrayal.  The cover-up.  The thing I-must-not-tell-anyone.  And I knew better, and they knew I knew, so their patience took a seat to their anxiety as they tiptoed around me, waiting for the dreaded phone call or the cops to arrive.  Time, even at those moments, can have a way of halting everything in a moment and making it stand-still, as if it had its own life.  My dad came outside to the deck which I was standing on.  Now this was out-of-custom because one of my given demands was that he “stay the hell away from me.”  Part of the bargain.  This time, judging by his eyes, he had been crying.  He cried a lot in those days, but I steeled myseblf to it.  I had no room for pity for molesters and pedophiles. And I was his captive.   I glanced at him as if there was nothing there, and stared straight out into the willows.  His slippers scraped across the boards and he settled at a good distance.  ‘Come on Lori, come on come and get me’ I was thinking.  What he said must’ve killed him.

            “Amy, I want you to know something…I want you to do something with your life.  You have the most talent and the most potential than in anyone I’ve ever seen.  And I mean that.  Don’t waste your life.”  I stopped breathing, speechless.  My chest hurt.  He turned and walked inside.  That was the first time in my life that someone believed in me—someone I had once looked up to and begged for attention.  For one second, I was his daughter and he was my father.  For one moment I meant enough to be told that.  For one moment, I ached for that dad I always wanted.  And then it was gone.  I had an alcoholic biological father who was too drunk to recognize me, and a step-dad who watched me shower, and a mother who hated me.  But that moment wasn’t diminished, because he meant it.  I know he did.  For some reason, no one else could have said it that I would’ve believed.

…excerpt/CLIP/the Present…

     I never quite know who I am.  When I have a long enough stretch of time where I’m in my own skin (my own mind), I feel like I have more room inside to breathe.  I think ‘So this is me.  This is who I am.  Ok, then, let’s go.’  And then, some Tuesday,  DPD (Depersonalization Disorder) opens its mouth and I fall silent in the chaos of that vacuum.  I’ve lost me again.  No reasoning or science or soul-searching or writing.  I am disabled from the pen and so I know it must be real.  Just my physical stillness and internal cavity that is crying–the cry that offers no relief, but more panic.  I see all my thoughts in a speeding parade of sentences that pour from the mouth.  Mine doesn’t move or quiver.  I can’t feel anything but this aching tiredness and piercing terror.  All thoughts without emotions, all memories without any attachment–my skin is loose and thin.  I don’t speak at these times because I don’t know the girl that will form the words.  She’ll talk in short replies in a voice I don’t know.  This isn’t me.  And I’m slipping.  Everything is false–the world around me–merely particles of matter that aren’t there–they’re mirages.  They’ll dissolve away, and leave me here, alone, to madness.  I may not return.  …Three days later, or sometimes just three hours later, it’s over.  I made it.  I’m tight in my flesh and the bedsheets are cool beneath my fingers.  Okay.   Round 967 over.  Get up.

Small Parts (excerpt from a work-in-progress) part 1

I remember sneaking up on him, crawling across the nappy green carpet in my scratchy nightgown. Sometimes staples stick up from hidden ridges and prick my knees. The carpet is green and smooshed like fields after a storm, with mysterious, stitched rivers dividing the landmasses. I crawl to the end table that’s dull and sticky. Two owls with glassy, yellow eyes sit on their perch, holding up the dingy lampshade. A glass ashtray takes up the rest of the room. I watch his profile as he smiles and talks with his brother–my new uncle–who sits among empty beer cans on the other side of the dim living room. They’re talking with words I don’t quite understand. He laughs, so I laugh. I like his dimples. I like everything about this strange, new character. We’re learning how to spell his last name. He wants us.

He hears me laugh and slowly turns an annoyed, oily face in my direction. My hair is still wet from the tub. He puffs a large cloud of cigarette smoke into my shiny face. They laugh. I cough and laugh, too. They keep talking. It means go away.