The NaPoWriMo prompt for today which I used begins with the example of an unsettled, dream-like poem that asks questions and ends in a question. The prompt asks us to "write a poem that similarly resists closure by ending on a question, inviting the reader to continue the process of reading (and, in some ways, writing) the poem even after the poem ends."
In my initial vision of the poem I was going to write, I envisioned starting with descriptions and statements and moving into a series of questions. But as I wrote, the directly stated parts felt flat or overly narrative and naive, so I ended up just keeping and expanding the questions into a poem that is composed of nothing else. I could play with the lines and images for a lot longer than I've done, I'm sure. To speak of what my family rarely mentioned and I rarely let myself see is exhausting, so I'll stop with it as is for now.
Early on, the thought of Robert Hass's arresting poem "My Mother's Nipples" began tugging at my mind, especially its bizarrely playful use of rhymed partly-French lines. Once I got the rhyme of mystère and mère in my head they were stuck there. So for now I've left the line that came to me as an epigraph and tribute.
My Mother’s Back
C’est un mystère, le dos de ma mère.
How old was she when it began to rise and twist?
When she chose school over the rigid brace
And slung a hump over her shoulder for the duration?
Was her back a tree growing into a stiff wind?
Was it weighted by centuries of Jewish fear?
Was it handed down from a seamstress in Bialystok
Or from a rabbi hunched over his books?
Was it the curled rage of generations of brainy girls
Or the gray arch of a smashed tombstone?
Was it hard and loud as a high heel?
Was her back the breaching of a white whale,
A snowy mound, signifying the ultimate?
Was it a monstrous regiment of women?
Was it a wild mare rearing?
Was it full of stories that were never told?
Did it cry silently at night, yearning to be held?
Was it the skyline of New York from the Jersey side?
Was it a look back at the rocky Palisades?
Did it refuse to be comforted by my father’s hands?
Did it buzz with urgency? Was it swelled with feelings
She never seemed to have? A carrying case
Of everything about her life I couldn’t ask?
Was it a box of unsold candy from her father’s cart?
Was it whatever she cold-shouldered to go on?
Was it a fortress? Was it a temple?
Was it the speckled dark side of the moon?
Was it what she passed to me to carry out of view,
The heaviness, the ache, the drag of longing?
Was it the pack I have to hoist at last?
Was it a secret calling, the journey waiting,
Was it the unwritten poem, is it in these words?
--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not quote or cite without permission.
Wow, you really went for the questions? Good for you.
ReplyDeleteShe was a woman in a man's world and used that back to shrug off all that that entailed. Did it make her "harder" on her face? Maybe. But she still loved a joke and giving a toddler coke... She may not have forgiven me but I understood. Her life was full of what was right - did that give her permission to judge? Sure and acceptance of that is perhaps why everyone respected her back.
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