Take all her belongings lay them on the ground in two lines - a corridor of ownership: demitasse, embroidered guest towels, the sterling iced-tea sippers. Build a fire at the end. Assemble the women of your tribe in two files. Dressed in your mother's clothes walk down the path of possessions giving into the shadows of hands those things you choose not to own; gather into your arms what you desire. At the fire strip off her clothing; cast it into the flame. Take into your arms your possessions and walk, naked, into the dark yourself. (Adapted from an African ritual) They are stacked in the downstairs hall each box labeled in my mind - china for charity wedding gown to the museum; the gold sari she kept rolled up twenty years will be made into my evening gown. Purple vetch in stained-glass swatches - daisies cream the field on either side of the New York Thruway all the way to Buffalo but the sky is still small and comfortable as a blind kitten's eye. I grew up on Mercator in the kitchen: a flat projection of maps on which she blazed in red every trip she ever made until Europe and America veined the bloodlines of her journeys. And yet she wept over the phone, "He says I can't drive to Fargo, that I belong here cooking for him," my kid-gloved mother who drew on pigskin in the car and drove with her knuckles. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A BALLADE OF SUICIDE by GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON THE SECRETARY; WRITTEN AT THE HAGUE, 1696 by MATTHEW PRIOR LINES TO A BEAUTIFUL AND BUS-RIDING LADY by FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS A BLESSING FOR THE BLESSED by LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA THE GEOGRAPHER'S GLORY; OR, THE GLOBE IN 1730 by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN |