I wrote this poem after my great-grandmother's death in October 2006, about nine years after my grandmother- her daughter's-death.


Mother of mothers,
Nine years later and I still hear the rough purr of your voice,
Scolding your children with matronly regard.
Nine years later and I dance across your oak floors in frilly lace socks six sizes too small,
I play with paper dolls and scramble through books of decades past
Passed from your hands to theirs to mine,
Only to burn away in your urn of memories.
But the smoke never leaves my room
For sometimes it suffocates me in my dark slumber.
It's true-I could never really sleep
After you entered my cold room and held me close to you,
Whispering desperately that you loved me
When how stupid, stupid, was I to never realize why you would care about
the little unwanted yellow- headed runt.
I was never to you what I was to them.
For when my fingers ran amok on the cracked ivory keys
You heard angels surround you with their perfect harps.

I never knew what you knew-
That you drank from the crimson fountain that seemed to run in our blood like water,
That you tried to save her from that poison that would one day drown her-
And leave me playing in tainted puddles, not knowing where else to splash with my oversized yellow boots
I never knew how inside you were fading,
Your skin was patched and sallow,
Your spirit strong but your voice caught like a lion in a toothed trap,

I liked to pretend I could spin and spin on that floor forever,
That I could lie on fuzzy carpets and sleep on worn pillows
In your safe womb warm haven

How could I have predicted
that I would see you dead in your own body-
the hollow face, the ammonia stinking white tiles,
Death creeping down corridors waiting for you to release your fistful of strength and life
How could I have known
that nine years later I would be the same Big Girl in a tiny frail body with knobby knees
that I would still be waiting for the woman inside to sprout like a fat rosebud,
Only to find that there was no Goddess within,
For with you she had taken one big silent yawn
And fallen into a slumber of preoccupying nightmares,
Exhausted from the same scenes that actually pricked and poked her tender skin.

So as I flip through yellowed papers
I see they are remnants of a past not so far away,
Not even gone, not even dead,
But feeding that same fire from which your ashes flicker and fly
For I can smell them in that smoke that sets off no real alarm-
It is like oxygen to me now.
I no longer know now what is present and what is passed,
I no longer know if it matters.
For maybe, just maybe,
As long as I can remember the feel of slick floors,
Of deep gentle voices muffling the cries in the other room,
I can at least pretend to sleep
and rest in the technicolor glow of the lights in your gingerbread house.