Monday, December 12, 2011

Hindsight

There is no particular moment when loss becomes common place,
love becomes a black and white movie,
or a person becomes a memory.
Things like that just happen to the living.
Even the optimist realizes that

eventually

the glass overflows and the liquidity of life
drips all over the morning paper.
Even she has doubts about the outcome of belief,
envisions romance in color,
and wishes there were a moment,
 
Identifiable,

when she would recognize a memory for what it will be-
before it formed.
                         ~MNH June 2006

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Fifteen

A woman's outline was painted urgently onto the body of a girl
  in slashing red brush strokes.
She didn't notice then: the adults observing,
  deconstructing meaning in thoughtful stage whispers. 
It wouldn't have mattered.
She had no appreciation for art or animus
  and no patience for the obscure.
Yet she believed all abstraction was obscure.

   Girls mature faster...
 A vague warning when she first heard it,
  but by then she knew it as a vile lie.
Already the boys wanted mature things
  with an urgent curiosity once kept hidden behind oak trees.
Now it slithered up their legs, tangled in their hair,
  and marked them with its musk.

   The girl?

She wanted only to know
  how pigment gave art life,
  and why the woman was so frantic to escape
  that she rained in long, sad droplets from the girl's pores.
She wondered why a vine grew from nowhere
  binding her innards before emerging through her throat.
In retrospect, she will note the moment
and call herself ma'am.

                      ~Mari Nichols-Haining

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Twenty-six and Five. (Or: Unscripted)


The day had been foreshadowed by that year,
  so my words were well rehearsed.
Yet I hadn't thought to practice your response.

Then:
  you were curled on my left thigh, your head against my chest.
Two siblings hugged a leg, while another,
  only nine,
  sat beside us. Afraid to listen.

 He knew.
He understood the meaning of the groaning sobs
  that escaped despite myself as I cradled the phone.
I didn't even try
  to learn how not to cry.

I spoke. Then you.
 He's dead-- ...?
 you were repeating more than asking.
Then you deflated into me.

Santa came on schedule one night later,
yet noone tried to catch him sneaking in.
You were all too busy with grownup concerns
too large for me to reach and too strong for me to fight.
And with grief.

Perhaps it was the grief who stole my memories
  of your sixth birthday only a week later.
     I pray I made a cake.
But that entire year is lost to me now
  --hidden in hole dug by the details of a moment.

My senses are my memory.
  Without effort, I smell blackened tomato soup forgotten on the stove;
  I see the shadows in the corners flinching from our grief;
  I hear a thousand pieces of your sister's heart;
  as they fall like rainstick seeds inside her chest.
 I taste the anguish in her questions
  and feel your brother's fear when he pulls away,
Angry and overwhelmed.
 
And you.
 Your tears still cauterize where they fell into my heart,
 watering the animal fierceness of maternal instinct.
Yet as important as wrestling bears (or battling grief)
  is my duty to show you life and beauty
  and teach you to recognize and to feel.
Because life is emotion, anguish and elation alike.

But your tears still fall,
  and I still want to make this a dream and let him wake you up.

I am achingly helpless.
Rehearsing this would have been a mockery.

  ~Mari Nichols-Haining