An Alchemy of Words

poems to my grandmother (d. 1983)

"poems to my grandmother (d. 1983)"

I.

I remember skimming your surface like a rock,

glancing obliquely off your waters like a sunset.

Twelve times, twelve undulating, interlocking spheres,

twelve years

and then you sank.

A fish can feel the keel of a boat scrape the water's surface

with a sandpaper kiss.

Underwater, a fish can feel its scaled skin squeezed

by the passing ripples of a stone skipped,

ripples that, to them, are not circles

but amputated, aqueous bowls.

That is how I learn to feel you now:

in retrospect,

with time as my crippled third dimension.

II.

Were you ever young?

All I recall is a half-life gone,

a life half-lived,

a half-wife left,

ticking resolutely like radium towards decay,

your life splitting from you

like babies from a womb,

the umbilicus chewed through in mourning

like a mother cutting life support.

Yet you were young once,

twice, three times; you lived your life in threes...

as many lives as a 33% cat.

A child of the first great war,

coming into her own in the 30s.

Your own. No one else's, so alone,

and I imagine you dancing the dance of the starving

on a train that belched steam into the emptiness

of winter.

I hear this in the voices of your progeny:

your daughter;

hers.

We imagined it separately together

when you were long-silent in your grave,

ticking towards decay, gracefully, in fractions,

like musical notation getting faster.

III.

You were a water-colour artist

until life breathed fear into your breast

and made you old.

Even then, I remember your knotted joints kneading paint

onto fabric with a ball-point, metal tube.

Your death was marked

by a cardboard box that went from house to house

with all your brittle brushes

and crumbling cakes of paint.

I had never known, no one had ever told me

until you were gone:

You were an artist once.

You grew like a lump within my chest,

gaining stature, size, and rank

with all the tragic dignity of cancer.

IV.

Ernest Lindner taught you art.

He, who painted life in dead things like all men do.

I've seen you in his work,

captured in a gallery

beneath the wall-light's glow

but only twice, the only thing of you in twos.

Perhaps a third of you was not yet formed

or a third already gone.

Or, more likely, I suppose, a third of you

fell somehow short of art.

One is how I see you now:

a female's face with frightened eyes,

young, still young, so young, and yet a hand,

withered with years, wrinkled with yearning,

stained with the watery paint of liver spots,

disguised your mouth, disfigured you.

That hand was the hand I know,

it was you, grandma, you keeping you

from speaking out.

You, silent and therefore lost to me.

Voiceless...

The second was you as well,

a shy nude, nineteen.

You must have loved him.

You must have dashed yourself on prairie stones

believing that love was meaningless

yet he loved you, too.

I never had the chance to show you that.

But he was old and kept you young.