A short stolid woman, brown from farm work, though now only a kitchen
garden on this new property, on the phone line, so their children could be
sure
they were okay, to know, you know, they hadn’t died
out there all alone, where you can see the naked stars at night
and live so much in silence that at times it all goes still
a single sound stretched thin and strange, impossible to place.
She barely spoke, things more words than words in that place,
fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, fried potatoes, eggs over-hard on the kitchen
table with the oilcloth cover, milk from the milk cow she kept still.
But each visit, sometime, the two of us alone, there was one story she was
sure
to tell, how I was born, not on her birthday, but the next night,
me, her birthday present – just a day late. Her delight never died.
She barely spoke. Nor my grandfather, nor my father, nor those who died
before them. I come from these silent people, from a place
where use counts more than talk. Weather, crops, day, night,
family, what persists. The relatives gathering in the kitchen
round the woodstove for our visit of two thousand miles. Someone sure
to crack a joke – funny or not – there’d be laughter still.
She barely spoke, but once while my father and I sat so still
across from her at the table in the dark, and listened while the fire died
in the woodstove, her voice came out so clear and sure
as she spoke a chant of people and names as if to build her world in place,
solid as my father’s elbows on the oilcloth of the kitchen
table, clear as the light from the woodstove spilt across night.
More words than I’d ever heard her say, she said, that night.
She told of relatives, of friends, of children of friends, and still
more: children of children; who married; who left school; the kitchen
filled with her litany of new ones born, of some who died,
of those who stayed, and ones who left for another place.
Some I knew, most not, others I wasn’t sure.
She never faltered, she held me sure
as the day of my birth, safe in the night
whether I came or went, this chant my place,
part of her litany, in the still
center of her that lived as embers died
and we waited in the dark kitchen.
That would be my place and I felt safe and sure
there in the warm kitchen wrapped in night.
I would be there still, except she died.
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