Tag: Henry Stimpson

“Viola” by Henry Stimpson

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

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.

Two Poems by Henry Stimpson

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Why I Became a Writer

The recess bell was buzzing as I ran
to prop up my fallen bike, but Miss Williams
shooed me away: “I don’t care
if it’s the king of England’s bicycle!”

A tall angular woman with reddish hair,
my fourth-grade teacher
was a descendant of Roger Williams,
she told us more than once,

and a distant cousin of Ted Williams
of the Red Sox, with his terrible temper.
Signing my report card in perfect
schoolteacher script, Miss Williams

flunked me in handwriting.
Next year, when I told her I passed,
she asked to see my scribbling, snorted
and said Miss Shields was far too easy.

But once when I wrote a composition
about driving up Mount Washington,
Miss Williams circled “crystal clear air”
and other fine phrases and gave me an A.

Constance Williams is long dead.
I’m the only one in the world
thinking of her right now
and how it’s her fault.


My Italian Grandfather

looked up from his sickbed
and said “Henry Timpton!”
to gently tease me and chuckled
to have a grandson with such a name
in America, where anything’s possible.
I was six, wary in that dark room.
Grampa was very sick,
Mom said, but I couldn’t catch it.
He’d given me a hot, itchy
summer haircut a month earlier.
I fussed and squirmed, I was bad.

In his linoleum barbershop
a framed photo of the invincible
Rocky Marciano watched over
bottles of Bay Rum, a push broom,
a massive leather barber’s chair
and an ornate cash register with numbers
that popped up ding!
A crumbling butt in the toilet
spewed brown curlicues in the water.
In a drawer, his brass knuckles lurked.

“Muscarales,” he’d say and give me
a dime to buy Three Musketeers,
and I’d run up to Garceau’s for his beloved bars.

Adamo in Italy, he was Adam
in that Rhode Island mill town,
where with thousands of haircuts
in he floated a big house,
a wife and ten kids through the Depression.
He refused to cut his price below 50 cents,
made red wine in his dirt basement,
smoked Camels and stiffed the IRS
until cancer took him at 62.

On a website, I find a grass-covered grave marker
          Adam Iervolino 1893 – 1955
He was born a year later than I thought.




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.