1.
“I put my checkbook right there,”
Mom wails. “Am I losing my mind?”
Old bills, notes on scraps and snapshots
breed on the dining-room table,
but no checkbook surfaces.
Mutely, she shuttles from the bedroom
to the living room, piling on the sofa
her hats, sweaters and thin lilac gloves
that were stylish decades ago.
2.
When the movers come,
Mom shrieks at Dad, “It’s all your fault!”
Stripped bare, the dusty rooms
of their little red house echo.
“Let’s go to my house,” I say.
In the passenger seat, she nods out
clutching $36 in her left hand,
a smile on her creased lips.
She thinks she’s moving in with me.
3.
“I could have had a wonderful job
at the bank,” Mom whimpers
when I drive her to their new place.
But she was afraid to leave Linda
and me alone with Dad,
just back from the mental hospital.
4.
The first night in their seniors apartment,
she locks herself out, shrieking
in the hallway in her nightgown.
They send her to the same hospital
Dad went to forty years ago.
5.
In the nursing home,
Mom is lost in a Sunday paper flyer
that’s as gaudy as a macaw.
“That’s not bad!” she says,
pointing to a sneaker on sale.
I plop down, unnoticed.
Her plump pal Mrs. Quinn eyes
the peanut butter crackers
I bought for scrawny Mom.
I crack open the cellophane
and we three have a party.
The crackers are delicious,
bright orange and salty.
She meanders in her slipper-tiny feet
as I walk her slowly down the corridor.
“I love you,” she says with a gappy grin
(they’ve taken away her bridge)
and my heart leaps.
6.
After another bladder infection,
she’s back in the hospital,
not eating or drinking much.
An intravenous line snakes to her hand.
She sits up and stares wide-eyed
at the brown blotches mottling her legs
as if they were a strange map.
“Can’t I get a cup of coffee in here?”
she asks no one in particular.
7.
I put a plastic spoon brimming
with coffee milkshake to her mouth.
Her lips purse tight.
I hand her the spoon.
She plunges the handle in.
I grab it and her mouth pops open
like a baby bird’s
and I shovel the gelid liquid in.
“That’s my son!” Mom tells the nurse,
who purrs, “He’s a nice boy.”
My boyish spirits soar.
I’ll save her life with thickshakes!
She’ll go back to the nursing home,
where I’ll love her again like a baby.
But eating’s too much bother.
She needs a feeding tube to survive.
Linda and I say no. Dad goes along.
They disconnect the IV.
8.
Mom fights for air, fast wheezing breaths,
wrenched-open mouth, dead stale smell,
one eye shut, the other open, glazed as a marble.
She flinches when I kiss her near her shrunken ear.
“You’ve been a great mother,” I say.
“Been” feels like a betrayal.
9.
In a pinkish casket
Mom lies with roses,
looking oddly determined,
almost the mother I knew.
Dad kneels there, crying.
“She’s in heaven now,”
the Catholic priest says.
10.
One of ten fed by the coins
her Italian papa gleaned in his barbershop,
Viola Iervolino married a Yankee
and learned how to crack a lobster.
Viola Elizabeth Stimpson reads
the granite headstone on the family grave.
In this faded color snapshot,
a pretty young woman in shorts
joyously hoists a striped bass
her husband caught. Months later
his seed and her egg will fuse
and time will begin.
Henry Stimpson has been a public relations consultant and writer for decades. His poems, articles, and essays have appeared in Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Lighten Up Online, Rolling Stone, Muddy River Poetry Review, Mad River Review, Aethlon, The MacGuffin, The Aurorean, Common Ground Review, Vol1Brooklyn, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe and other publications. Once upon a time, he was a reference librarian, a prison librarian, and a cab driver. He lives in Massachusetts.
Sparks of Calliope 