My Father’s Mother
began to disappear
after her husband’s death,
but it took us years to notice.
When I was still a little child
she seemed present, solid as
the marble-top credenza in her room.
Some women, widowed young enough,
fill their spousal gap with yet
another man or, as one friend did,
with a piano; they expand
into the second movements
of their lives. Not she.
My grandmother, who could
sew children’s toys and woolen coats,
paint a landscape or a wall,
seemed to shrink each year—
30 years of loss and looking for—
who knows? The man
whose illness made him fade
into the cream-colored sheets?
For consolation, one bright bird
swayed on a weed above the snow.
She must have decided one
late afternoon: that isn’t enough.
Made herself so tiny on the orthopedic bed,
she vanished.
.
My Mother’s Mother
was not stout but sturdy,
worked like a farm girl,
which she was and spent
her long life smoothing
wrinkles out, like so:
the iron, the crease
the linen in the mangle,
corner on the sheet,
pie crust stretched tight
over the oozing fruit.
I knew she was
soft and firm, dimpled
as she husked corn
shelled peas, snapped
beans. The flesh
of her upper arms
flapped in its skin;
I marveled at the plasticity
she retained for years.
She tried to gather her clan
as if, through mere
proximity and quantity,
love would emerge.
She did not begin dwindling
until very late, lost
her firm softness.;
brittle as an apple seed,
she shut her eyes
and wept a little,
then disappeared from
a room built over the orchard.