Mother Love, a Blues, and: You

Mother Love, a Blues

My mother hung laundry on the line,sheets and our small clothes clipped with pins.Sometimes she gave us castor oil with juice.Sometimes we left for school in unshined shoes.

My mother hung laundry on the line,the sun doing its work of drying,sometimes in minutes as we circled the yard.Sometimes porridge was boiling on the stove.

My mother hung laundry on the line,young and what some called beautiful:blond hair—an aura, a mane, or a flame—often, when she wept, curtaining her face.

My mother strung what, exactly,to that line? Older than she was then,what do I know anymore to be true,what do I invent? My mother

hung laundry on a line—every dayor once in my whole childhood?Sometimes she loved us. Sometimes herself.Often it was neither, or both.

You

You bring out the ragged in me.The razor-edged, cellophaned, jagged in me.

You bring out the neurotic in me.Hours scouring for more news of ISIS in me.

You bring out the panic in me.Never-going-to-sleep-can’t-face-the-dark rising in me.

You bring out the liar in me.I’m fine. How are you doing? rebounder in me.

You bring out the amnesic in me.Memory, a flock of birds wheeling in me.

You bring out the bean counter in me.Seconds measured like spoons of salt spilling in me.

You bring out the rivers in me.And the seas and the oceans eroding in me.

You bring out the groveler in me.The beggar, deal-maker, tight-rope walker in me.

You bring out the bad music in me.The not-so-pretty, far-from-gritty self-pitying me.

You bring out the clouds collecting in me.All but cumulus, the one my child’s forgotten in me.

You bring out the sorriest of Bad Wolves in me.Dropped baskets, loose teeth, lost pathways in me.