Strawberry Moon Rises
We’re living in a mud house,
one main room with a sink,
a small galley kitchen off the one room,
a bathroom somewhere, presumably.
It’s handy to have the extra sink
in the main room but also strange.
We have a heavy kitchen table.
I look for things we might renovate,
casting my eyes around and around
the main room, its maroon mud walls, so smooth;
perhaps a fireplace could go under the sink.
I don’t see any other place for it,
but I want a fireplace,
and it would make the room cozier.
Your stepmother visits despite dying months ago
and never visiting us once your dad died.
She sits at the table. She doesn’t say much.
She seems to brighten a bit
as I explain my renovation ideas,
Perhaps she’s a better wife to my stepson
and more chic than I thought, she thinks.
Maybe she is rethinking
not leaving you any of her family’s money,
a Californian fortune promised to us
sitting near their brick fireplace during our honeymoon.
Maybe there is hope of a nicer place to live,
a fireplace already there,
no need to help my husband dismantle
so many years loving an unloving stepmother.
But it’s too late to change her mind.
She’s dead, the will irrevocably snapped shut.
She fades. I continue to figure out
ways to make our small home livable,
ours, dirt floors and all,
find a bigger lock for the door.
You Break In
A day after Mother’s Day,
a little over a year after you died,
something scratches desperately at the window.
The living room wall shakes
from vibrating wings opening out into a tight space,
claws trying to find something to grasp,
it’s large, falling in the wall, now.
There’s no speaking or yelling,
no chirping, no distress calling.
A Frida Kahlo doll made by a painter friend
starts to wobble on the bookshelf,
the cats rush to me, stare hard.
We all freeze,
our gazes moving up to the ceiling, vents,
as the sounds, not human, rise,
travel over creaking beams.
Last week, the housecleaner
stopped dusting the bookcase, looked troubled
by a sound from the flue above the stove.
Pointing, trying to break the news gently, she said,
I think you have something up there.
I laughed, said, The wind always makes that sound.
It’s just the wind.
Those last days, unconscious from a stroke,
the test of wills between you and my sister clotted,
she interpreting your DNR order to mean
you get nothing to eat or drink,
you lasting like that longer than anyone thought you could.
I couldn’t do anything about this cage and the others,
I yell at the wall.
You don’t hear me, walking away,
thuds of defeat headed toward another way out.
Written after Word of Your Death, / I Think You’d Like Parts of This Poem
You opened some doors for me,
you shut some doors, too,
I wasn’t very open, either,
those years I took your classes,
my poems hid things even from me,
and I didn’t know how to act, still don’t.
We spied the fearful rabbit we each were,
that trick of keeping still not really hiding us,
nor our backgrounds of scramble, dust baths,
and you reminded me of my dad,
midwestern-quiet, critical,
while your jacket of Ivy League tweed, elbow patches, hinted
I could be either a kissing-up student
or a crushing student.
I couldn’t do either one, other students rushing past me,
their poems toasted with confetti rain by your mag and press.
Death and desire are at the edges of your poems,
life as dream we love while knowing it’s still a dream.
You stashed these parts of yourself away during class,
maybe in the desk drawer or credenza.
We let those walls fall a few times.
My first reading, the lecture hall filling,
shaking, my face pale,
you came over and looked me in the eye,
Read slower than you think you need to,
let the applause wash over you,
let yourself feel it and enjoy it.
I could breathe, again, skate into the rink’s center, poised.
I searched for your face as the lights came back on,
and you looked so very proud.
Re-submitting a revised poem to workshop,
I’d added too much clay,
it had become a globby mess.
There was a little silence.
The earlier version was better,
maybe try again. Forget our comments. We laughed.
At an opening for an artist’s final drawings,
dusk-falls just before her death,
you saw I was moved and walked over.
I don’t remember what you said,
but we were facing the opening and shutting of light, together.
I now know your wife was dying, gone a year later.
Couplets, your first lesson, and tall darkening farmhouse windows,
I find you there, the matter of us, our lives, dissolving.
Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks. Her newest chapbooks, Eyes of Some Robbers and Unbecoming, are forthcoming. She has an MFA from the University of Virginia and a Doctorate of Arts from the State University at Albany. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies and been finalists in the Northwind Writing Award and contests at Black Fox Literary Magazine and So to Speak. One poem earned an Honorable Mention in the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities Contest and another, First Place in the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize. She has the invisible disabilities of ME/CFS and fibromyalgia and lives in Laredo, Texas.
Image: komgrit, morguefile.com
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