Like This My Mother Can Stand

And like this my mother can stand, lost in thought over the slightest movement, a mere moment, five seconds, an old newspaper by the side of the road that lifts with the wind of a passing car, comes to rest again once it’s gone; the first potato that sprouts in the cellar and can soon be laid in earth, which still needs to be turned one last time. She throws her scarf over her shoulder, stacks firewood so the sweat pours off her beneath her sweater; she bends toward the pile of felled and split pine, stretches toward the stack in a continuous circular motion, faster and faster; my father’s fingers with his flat nails rifle through English journals in the office. A cold cup of tea rests on the floor in front of the bookshelf of ring binders. The cat sneaks over and sniffs with interest, drinks from it, and my father hears nothing, doesn’t see it. My mother walks to the front of the house, picks one of the large spotted pears from the grass, damp and stone-cold on the side that faced the earth. Takes it with her into the backyard, up to our grotto with the old lawn chairs and tarp. It smells rotten; the white paint on the garden chair coils in upon itself, cracks; flakes have torn themselves free and been blown away; others swirl in the wind in a chorus of whispers, which usually belongs to the leaves. She can’t remember when she was up here last. The girls have buried a mouse to the left of the path; she sees the cross of the two bound sticks. Two birds are somewhere upon the two flat meters of earth in front of the willow hedge that shields the grotto from the slope. And my mother sees her youngest daughter bicycling in small loops down on the terrace in front of the house, or she watches her lean the bicycle against the wall behind the shed, lay it in the grass back by the chickens in order to spin the bicycle wheels, be a mechanic; I’m reading in my room, or I’m up giving the horses water. She can’t manage to gather it all, all the pictures in a stubborn crumbling pastry dough that doesn’t want to; she’s simultaneously appalled and peaceful, like that moment when one stops grabbing in the air for the glasses and just lets them fall, simply awaits their crash, their shattering. Almost resolved. She shakes an old shopping bag dry and sits with her back against the oak tree. All these movements that happen elsewhere, in other rooms, in other spaces; these movements she can’t perceive in a unified picture, but which rush through her, upon their own heels, rolls of silk ribbon; they fall and unravel, loosen like the meat from cooked bone, all these words or all this silence, a nod, a burr picked from one’s tights, from the hair, from the arm, a page turned by a dampened finger, the cat that overturns a cup of cold tea, and the tea that settles in the cracks between the floorboards, the ocean that draws itself back onto the beach, while my older sister helps with the sails, looks out over the mounds of seaweed and stone that have surfaced. That she can’t even see it, can never relate it; she can’t get a hold of it, place a finger on it, but there’s a loneliness that hangs over it all, a mire of hands and burrs collapsing, which she will never speak of, all that has a life of its own.

Read more from Issue 15.1.