M

November 2, 2023

“Salt” by MPosted by

M

SALT

In this room down a hall
at the Hopewell House
every Wednesday
from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.,
the widowed have agreed to meet
to lick the salt block.
My name tag reads
Albino deer (recessive rarity): widow at 35.
Dun-colored Helen and Marie
mistake me for a sheep or a goat
as we draw our chairs into a circle
of circumstance. Muscles in their aged faces
twitch with greed and suspicion.
In the larger world,
Jean and I would sit in adjoining streetcar seats,
read our newspapers,
and never share a headline.
Even Doris, who drags the remains
of a personal god at the bottom
of her purse, tucked next to non-prescription
reading glasses she bought on sale at Walmart,
shrinks from my pink eyes.
Louise has ten grandchildren,
three she and Harry were raising
because her daughter is, well, you know,
she doesn’t want to say. She won’t tell you either
that when Harry up and died like that,
some small part of her wished
he’d had the decency to take those kids with him,
but he never even took them to the park.
Betty lost a husband and found
a lump. Elsie says when the ambulance
comes to the Ridgewood Nursing Home,
they don’t turn on the sirens
for fear they’ll incite a riot
of dying. Ida says yeah, she knows.
She’s lost two of them that way. I nod.
Judith’s raised eyebrow asks
What could one with hooves so pale know of loss?
A marriage must be long
to be 40 years deep,
and grief is a black market business
best kept to themselves. If I taste it,
others will want it.
Young bucks will be dying in droves.
In war, in the streets,
in flaming buildings.
Or quietly in a bed next to me at night.
That sting in the wound, that particular tang
on the tongue, are theirs.
Keep me away from the salt.
Their old ones are sanctified,
their sorrow is sacred,
denial alive in the hide.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

__________

M: “I was widowed at a very young age. My therapist suggested I attend a grief support group to share with others in similar circumstances. When I walked into the room, I was struck by the realization that everyone was at least 25 years older. And while we shared grief in common, the concerns of these older widows were very different from mine. On many levels, we just couldn’t connect. I also read stories online of other young widows who experienced similar feelings of alienation in grief support groups filled with older women. I wanted to write about this disparity, but didn’t know how to approach it. Then about a year ago, I attended a reading by Lucille Clifton. She told an unrelated story about driving through a forest with a friend, and their joy upon catching a glimpse of a rare albino deer. The more I thought about that misfit deer, the more I realized Ms. Clifton had unknowingly offered me a perfect metaphor for my experience. I became the albino deer, and I hope that my poem will speak to other young widows who find themselves lost among the elders of the herd.”

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June 24, 2016

“Late” by MPosted by

M

LATE

Yes, I know. I’m late picking you up.
Truth is I was picked up by another man.

The crematorium director was quite accommodating.
He even did the Mexican hat dance

around the question of how they ensure the ashes of one person
have been entirely removed before they shove the next

into the oven. You’re no saint, you know.
How many people are you mixed up with now?

The container I chose looks like an overly large envelope.
I’ve turned you into a billet-doux

which even you must admit is much better than a debate
about the need for a hospital when you’re having chest pains.

You were the one who taught me to go into these things
not afraid to lose. Have you ever noticed that those

who’ve been ordered to evacuate always keep the wrong things?
An old Speed Stick deodorant. A souvenir lighter from Bourbon Street

that’s run out of fuel. A voice message saying, I’ll be late.
People call the dead late, as though they might show up any minute,

so we widows waste the best parts of our guilt waiting
for a perturbed operator to ask if the deceased will accept the charges

leveled against them. We wander in worn-out nightgowns. We become religious
about a steady diet of Entenmann’s chocolate-covered donuts

because expert studies have shown that a human brain
can’t distinguish the difference between chocolate and love.

That new Tempur-Pedic mattress starts to feel like a slab at the morgue,
so when another man slows his Ford F-150

to ask if anyone important to us knows we’re out there
sleeping in the middle of a soft dirt road,

and tries to gather us up
like a bundle of dirty laundry,

we say we just wanted to lie down and rest for a minute
on something forgiving.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016

__________

M: “I’ve heard it said that sometimes poets must lie to get to the truth. However with this poem, I decided just to tell the truth, and hoped that would do.”

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January 17, 2015

“Clean White Sheets” by MPosted by

Ekphrasis Challenge #2: Artist’s Choice

 

Untitled by James Bernal

Image by James Bernal. “Clean White Sheets” was written by M for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Fall 2014, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

__________

M

CLEAN WHITE SHEETS

I asked to be left alone with you.
They weren’t happy about it, but who’s cruel enough
to argue with the widow? One of them hangs like a painting
in the hallway for quite a while before he huffs,
and reluctantly goes. As reluctant to accept the disruption
of me as this clean white room is, with its clean white walls.
Clean white rolling door. Clean white sheets.

I’ve come to dress you for burial. Or cremation.
In all the times we talked about it, you never specified which.
Nor what you wanted to wear. You’d probably pick
the Skinny Dick’s Halfway Inn T-shirt, bought when we visited
Susan in Fairbanks. She always complained about the city’s
20 hours and 17 minutes of night on winter solstice,
but we loved the dark’s invitation to linger longer
in the Regency’s luxury sheets making good
on the T-shirt’s promise of Loose Women Tightened Here.
And if I dressed you in it, what would I wear
to bed on those nights I needed to make you laugh?
Too sick for sex by then, but never for a laugh.

You said you wanted to come back as a nautilus,
a living fossil relatively unchanged after 500 million years
of evolution, with the rare ability to withstand being brought up
from its depths with no apparent damage from the experience.
I pull back the white sheet to remind you that a diabetic
who survived Woodstock on nothing but carrots and acid
was probably already a living fossil.
Why do we cover the faces of the dead?
Are we afraid it would be rude to stare?
Or are we afraid they might stare back at us
with not a hint of recognition?

You are still intact—your generous chest
which never had enough hair to suit you,
your penis mottled by vitiligo, that one-of-a-kind
penis you said would allow me to positively identify you
even if you’d been decapitated.
But you haven’t been. Your head is here.
Everything I’ve ever wanted is here, surprisingly unchanged
after what seems like 500 million years of marriage.
Except the dark outside the window now
is threatening. As are white sheets.
Which will never find their way onto my bed again.
No matter how high the thread count.
No matter how Egyptian the cotton.
Hotel rooms are going to be hell.

—Ekphrasis Challenge #2
Artist’s Choice Winner

__________

Comment from the photographer, James Bernal: “It might come from my background of reading into photographs and making up little stories about the subjects, but I loved everything about ‘Clean White Sheets.’ It was very funny but also very real and honest—I almost feel as though the author truly knew something I didn’t about the recently deceased. I feel like I know who that person was and the life he lived and that he was loved. Thanks M, I’ll never be able to look at this photo without imagining a lonely night at Skinny Dick’s Halfway Inn.”

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July 26, 2013

“For Those Who Never Know What to Say to Widows” by MPosted by

M

FOR THOSE WHO NEVER KNOW WHAT TO SAY TO WIDOWS

Two months after the funeral, leave your wife and two teenage sons, drive fourteen hours straight from Eagle to walk up our porch unannounced. Open the garage door the way people used to. The remote is broken. Fix it. Take four truckloads of scrap lumber, crumbling drywall, and junk appliances to the dump. Cook a chili so fine we forget our lost appetites. Open a bottle of anything that costs less than a sympathy card. Lie behind us on the futon. Touch us, because other than one 20-minute appointment with a gynecologist’s plastic speculum, we’ve gone from being touched all the time to being held as if we’d spent half a hot day cleaning Cutthroats from Gore Creek. Tell us that story. Again. The one where you and Nick drop acid and drive his flat-black Valiant with no dashboard to Wyoming to hunt jackalope. In a blizzard. About getting to milk one because the females sleep belly up. Say, No, honest. Waking up in the Casper rescue mission wearing other people’s clothes. Say, Hey, it was monomyth, babe. Sleep in the guest room. After breakfast, tie down Nick’s ’74 Suzuki in your truckbed with red ratchet straps, slap the seat once she’s secure. Say, He was an original. Kiss us like you mean something, even though you don’t know what the hell that is. Maybe it’s just three decades of Nick, and we’re the last thing that touched him. Take I-80 east. Manage to keep your shit together until Elko, at least.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

___________

M: “Many widows I’ve spoken to have told me that after their husband’s death, they felt a wall had gone up between themselves and the rest of the world. I was locked behind this wall myself, so far from everything I might consider an everyday life. This poem was born of a deep desire to tell the truth, which I believe many widows can’t or won’t do. We know people are afraid of us, afraid of saying the wrong things. This fear as well as the standard platitudes others hide behind often only add bricks to that wall. Somehow my husband’s best friend of 30-plus years knew there aren’t any right words. He simply trusted in our shared grief enough not to fear being real with me. I pray this poem will give people permission to let go of fear, reach through the wall, and have faith in their instincts.”

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July 27, 2012

“To A Husband, Saved By Death At 48” by MPosted by

M

TO A HUSBAND, SAVED BY DEATH AT 48

You will not see me, now
older than you are.
You will not watch my toenails
harden into turtle shells.
You will not complain about my face
creams costing more than most people
spend on groceries in a month.
Nor see me apply them to my hands
because no matter how young a woman’s face looks,
it’s always the back of her hands
that give her away.
You will never think of me as a suitable gift
for a toddler on Christmas,
shrunken to doll size, wrapped in skin
as thin as bargain paper. You will not be the one
to drive me home wet
from the Lloyd Center Mall
where restrooms are hidden away like exclusive resorts
down remote corridors.
You will not need to remind me
to take my umbrella when it’s raining,
nor find my car keys
in the refrigerator next to the eggs I bought yesterday
and we will not laugh about it.
You will not hear me struggling with nouns.
You will never be awakened late on Friday evening
by a ringing phone, wife gone from your bed,
Detective Copeland saying she was found asking people
to help her find her husband
at a Taco Bell on Burnside
that stays open from 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.
every day but Sunday.
Someone else will sit with me in the ER on New Year’s Eve
listening to an alcohol poisoned teenage boy
vomit in the next room while we wait for news
about the golf ball on my temple, received for nothing more complicated
than slipping off a curb.
You will not see me without my teeth
or my gallbladder.
Never need to learn I’ve been sexually inappropriate with Paul
in The Pearl Memory Care Residence at Kruse Way
where I live apart from you for the first time in fifty years.
You will not be the one to close my eyes.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalists

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August 4, 2011

“While My Mother Rots in Memory Care at Regency Park” by MPosted by

M

WHILE MY MOTHER ROTS IN MEMORY CARE AT REGENCY PARK

At the Waffle House, if you’re facing some
bitter truth, we’ll save you a window booth.
And we will be waiting.
—David Wilcox, “Waffle House”

My 82-year-old father calls for the second time today
to tell me what he really wanted
was for my mother to have gotten
off their flowered couch in 1985 and boarded that Boeing 727
with him to the Big Island. I’ve clamped the phone
between my shoulder and my ear, and a rusty can opener
that should have been buried in a landfill years ago
to the top of a 29 oz. can of Hunt’s Tomato Puree.
It’s splintering the edge of the lid
into tiny shark’s teeth. My thumb is bleeding.
He’s gone on to volcanoes, lava flows,
and black diamonds spewed in the air.
The CD player clicks and suddenly David Wilcox
is illuminating the finer points of altered states after the midnight hour
while scraping eggs and flour from the napkin dispenser
at the Waffle House. I grab a napkin and ask If a black diamond
had a favorite song, what would it be?
He says Hmmm. I don’t know—That Old Black Magic, I guess.
I say Black diamonds, black magic—who wouldn’t have thought
of that? You’re not very original.
He says How the hell should I know
what a black diamond’s favorite song would be?
Anyway, black diamonds don’t listen to music.
I say How do you know? He says They don’t have ears.
I say Like that’s necessary.
You’re practically deaf, and you constantly complain
about your upstairs neighbor with the swollen prostate
waking you up all night every time he pads barefoot
to the bathroom to pee. You don’t seem to have any trouble
hearing with no ears. He says Okay, wait a minute—
a black diamond’s favorite song is Daddy’s Little
Pain-in-the-Ass Girl. I say Hey, old man, you called me.
He says Not to talk about what kind of music
black diamonds listen to. I say Well, what do you want
to talk about? He says
She never wanted to go anywhere.
Now it’s too late.
Something I can’t have, I guess.
She’s my wife he says. I say She’s my mother.
He wants me to say losing someone to death
is a step up from losing someone to dementia.
That Mrs. De Luca’s calico cat who had his broken tail amputated
an inch at a time hurts worse than the three blind mice combined.
That if she’d had the decency to die instead, his grief would take him
on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to that mythic country called closure.
But I don’t lie to him. I never have.
Even when it’s necessary. I say Join the crowd.
I say If my husband was still alive,
I’d put him on the phone to argue with you
while I wrestle this big game fish of a can to the deck.
Maybe he could go get me a Band-Aid too.
He says I’ll call you tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll come visit.
Do you need anything?
I say Yeah, a new can opener would be good.
He says What kind of music do they listen to?

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

M: “So, I was at my father’s apartment changing his bed linens on Saturday, and I said, You know, Mrs. De Luca thinks we’re always mad at each other. He said, Why the hell would she think that? I said, She thinks we talk mean. He said, Tell that old biddy to go back to fussing at her damn cat. I said, Do you need me to do anything else around here? He said, No, thanks. Get the hell out of here and go have some fun. I said, You do know I love you, don’t you, you old bastard? He said, Why are you being so nice to me? Did the doctor call? Am I dying or something?”

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