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PoetryRepairShop CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL POETRY
issue 9905:14
Lyn Lifshin
The DAY AFTER MOTHER'S DAY, FIVE YEARS LATER
that Monday, we stumbled dazed
thru candles and roses, wrapping paper,
hoping mother might swallow some
pears, not say she wanted to die.
I was in someone else's dream.
The sky is lead and cobalt,
crouching and burying the house.
Gift paper could have been leaves
already rusting and dying.
It was as if someone else's
mother must have grown this thin,
unable to pull her self up
from the toilet, the chair, the
side of the bed, waiting for some
stranger to sponge her. One night
she dreamt of plums and watermelon
in wet leaves and woke up starved,
her eyes shiny as porcelain. Under
flannel, her bones jutted out, a ghost
of the plum dark haired woman
who got the most phone calls
in college in a state I never
expected to be writing this close
too. My mother, who could
outwalk me in blizzards, in boiling
sun, dissolving. The better days
more cruel, a paper orchid
wrinkling under the skin of the
pond water, the whirl pool
(©1999 all rights retained by author)
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