what are these hands, if they cannot touch the things they love? (hannah marcus, 'demerol')

[this is not finished by any means, but it's something]











a)

three times this week
she has repeated to me
this same
story.

it’s how are you, baba?
& then it is soon clear she is not
here but living in this
reminiscence, speaking of
her mother, dead forty years:

my mother! one summer,
you know, she rented out
our garden house, the one
under the linden with the
shiny tin roof where the
purple asters grew –

& you know, she saved enough money
to buy a dress in kalush,
a long white sarafan’ka
vyshyvanka

a dress
with burgundy-gold stitches
the colour of the babyne lito, that’s
the grandmother’s indian summer

& then she flutters her quaky hands,
moves them like the billows
of white linen, showing me
her mother crossing a sunlit yard,
under a blue sky as spacious
as the
heart –

b)

we’re driving down the highway
& out the window & i notice
the wheat looks sad this year, golden
but bowing under october frost,
grazing the last warmth of the earth –
& then she says, so plaintive:

i’m tired

& i miss my mother

my mother in the front
opens her mouth,
startled, wanting to reassure her

no you have ten more years left
at least you’re not tired you’re fine
just fine – she’s the frightened daughter,
a meadowlark rising startled from
the field

but baba turns to her & says
no,
not much longer. winter will be cold
this year. ash berries pull heavy on the trees.

then: i can
feel it –

c)

in the hospital
we visit her drowsy bedside.
her blue eyes stare at us
like tears in a body
already dissolving into the air –

i think she knows us, for
she tries to speak to us
words guttural & trapped
like clots in her mind,
lips bruised purple from her
fall –

i grasp her fingers cold
branches reaching to twine
around mine

& i’m going to cry
so i try to make her laugh,
no singing today, babusja,
not til you’re better?

& she smiles as her head
turns, we kiss her brows as
she drifts to the white snow
of the pillow –

& i cry then, when i turn
to go & see
her sleeping hands suddenly
stretching upwards

her arthritic
limbs trembling like a child’s
little fingers reaching
up

to tug on the trailing embroidery
of her mother’s
skirt –

-- november 14, 2005