Sestina
She would spin and spin and spin, and see
in smears the sun, hot on the tulips,
brilliant in her hair, her small
face strange and sudden in the dark glass
of the shed's shattered windows. She sang aloud, and hummed
under her breath one line: "and then the mother said, this is my dying day."
Up on the porch, her mother winced. Her dying day?
She thought of eerie movies, where little girls can see
the gruesome fates of their doomed relatives. She hummed
the "Twilight Zone" theme to herself, arranged the tulips
in the little nursery-school vase made out of a jelly glass,
laughed, put this in perspective. Look, she's small --
and little ones are strange. When she herself was small
she must have had some morbid moments. But every day
her daughter sings this, at the ends of stories about glass
slippers, quests, and pumpkins: somehow the vast kingdoms by the sea
must pass from queen to princess, so she spun among the tulips,
no tale finished if the strange dirge wasn't hummed.
And what if death were like that? Not the hum
of hospital machines, not the small
sick smile through the morphine, not the flesh-pink tulips
nodding their analgesic smoothness in the white room, day by day.
Not to wait and wait and wait, but to have marked your calendar. Just to see
it easily, and to annouce it. Just to drink it from a glass.
Years later, she would listen for the door to open, downstairs. All the glass
things hanging from it tinkled, and the notes her mother hummed
floated up from the dark kitchen -- with the low C
breaking as her voice broke -- floated up to the small
bed, where the daughter waited, wakeful. Every day
her mother came back from that sterile smell, and the tulips
could do nothing to mask it. But these are different tulips!
When she was a little girl, the world was not like glass --
so delicate, so terrible. In that world, a dying day
was not a real thing, and a mother was a fiction -- there, the bees hummed
in the hot grass. There, the rules were only for her strange, small
kingdom, where all around the leaves rustled like a big sea.
Can't you see? There was no prophesy. Those gleaming tulips
made for me my own small logic, made for fairy tales, the glass
of coffintops. She trembles, and awaits the break of day.
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