Returning, one more time…
with comfort on her fingertips,
back into the fold of words.
She was inundated this evening,
She was hopeful and hopeless too.
But he electrifies me.
Old truisms keep me trying, loving,
Making it through,
Drawing on every ounce of
Drunken dignity I possess.
And my own gratification
Is denied,
No not the lovemaking,
That’s complete and not
Altogether separate –
Just my beating heart.
Twenty-six years today, and dropped dead ten and a half years ago. They made fifteen years, and it was tough and bumpy. The reality of love is hard to relate, with her it’s been greater since he died. Semi-lucid, the story is told. A woman and a man, not a mother and a father, but two people who had their reasons, and their affair of romance. Set the stage on the fights, the making up – she would fall down, pass out on the toilet, he would disappear. And she goes on like a classic story: widowed, drunk, living vicariously. All the pictures are of her, in her robe, her hair in pincurls, the light overhead (my mother’s halo), the non-stop cigarette and the non-dry glass, the rings they leave, the ashes on the floor… Sad woman’s story, a classic: alone, working hard every day, drowning hard every night – it’s living death, it’s lonely beyond expression, it’s more than I can bear to face, to realize: together she’s not so pathetic. But that she is at all is more than I want to know, and my helplessness makes me selfish, pathetic, and just as surely alone.
Who is the woman she never did become? She was happy maybe ten years of 53. Looking into her future is like a closed funnel – or she’s dripping out at the bottom – her future is not.
I must grow up and be a daughter.
Motherless, fatherless, but never listless. Never heartless, never without
my own life – and not just this. Not just what I can see, what I can’t
dream: what I can, and what I never will. Enough strength to carry on despite
any and all sadness. This she gave me: Less. Less in me, less drive to
create it. Never, ever, alcoholic. Occasionally drunk but basically
healthy, on and on. And raise him right, no matter what, keep as much faith
as I’ve retained to this point, and liberation to be evolution, by design.
That will be raising all of the children right.
© Barbara Bales 1979-2007
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