Gypsy Mom
Words upturn since you asked me,
What color eyes do you wear?
Which birthday kissed first?
The first skin
mousseline, seven
layers of magnolia scarves
scarred to bud.
I bench-pressed years to inherit you.
Now I press rain
stones to your eyes and ask
Are you mad?
After silk-spinning, what of death?
Eighteen years gone, half
my life since your life
and still I grope at combustible things,
tucking them like dead pears
in my pea coat pocket.
Mammograms sweat the trunk,
pearls hustle my throat.
Even the school children in the ring
pine for your Grace Kelly swerve.
Candy! Candy! you want them to cry
but just the plum riddle of the flagpole,
like your stories, dumb and normal
with their stubborn plow of baby’s breath.
I radio dirty runaways
until the hot tapestries
of the star’s foliage
unfold the potato garden of stones
where you strut, blighted with mayonnaise,
skinny as the morning.
Pay me to the moon,
gypsy rough.
Strap me to the groins of camels
so I can join your caravan of corn nuts
and wave my flag of country and chamomile.
I’ll send one postcard:
Dear Mom,
I floated above Mosquito
Island’s coral reef wearing
your wetsuit. It was beautiful,
the fish ludicrously fat and bright.
| Ellen Elder |
|
levelheaded: Gypsy Mom
The first two stanzas of this poem are formally connected by a pair of strange questions that reference birth, “Which birthday kissed first?,” then death, “After silk-spinning, what of death?” With those questions, the speaker signals to her readers that she means to deal with two of art’s major topics: life and death.
When the third stanza comes around, the speaker eschews her earlier embellishment (listen to the sizzling “s” sounds in “The first skin / mousseline, seven / layers of magnolia scarves / scarred to bud”) for a more explicit explanation of exactly whose life and death we are reading about. “Eighteen years gone, half / my life since your life” seems to reveal the speaker as a 36 year old contemplating her mother’s death 18 years later (oh, math!). This moment of clarity is a frame for rest of the poem. Our knowledge of the mother’s death, coupled with a reference to “Mammograms,” alerts us to a real event around which our speaker’s thick, poetic language takes hold. A few lines later, we have the “p” and “c” sounds of “dead pears / in my pea coat pocket.” Our toehold in a real event provides us a perspective from which we can more directedly revel in sound. Without it, we might be lost.
That’s because the poem conceals as much as it reveals. The line, “but just the plum riddle of the flagpole,” is a riddle unto itself. Why does the speaker “radio dirty runaways?” How do words “upturn?” What is a “caravan of corn nuts?” This concealment is built of fragments from the speaker’s memory of her mother. Even if we don’t get a clear picture of those memories (the fifth stanza, for instance, gives us a vague depiction of an event involving the distribution of candy to school children), the poem’s enigmatic language takes turns conveying melancholy and humor – two keystones of the speaker’s nostalgia.
All this makes the poem’s finale particularly interesting. At the end of the poem, the speaker makes an optimistic prediction: “I’ll send one postcard.” As the tense shifts from past to future, the speaker’s thoughts crystallize into a kind of poem within a poem. The language is suddenly clear (perhaps as clear as the water over “Mosquito / Island’s coral reef”), and we have the poem’s great, final moment of exuberance and hope.
-The Editors
