Deconstruction of the Blues

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102 BACK HOME Dreaming into the tv’s dead eye or into the living room really the tv presiding plants pictures rug and easy chairs into time and stillness Pop gone a grin around his empty chair phantom me sliding down the wall pounding my fists in adolescent weltschmerz ghost of hormones past among my mother’s floral knickknackery Shape? thread? poem? But no here she comes herself bustling away all poetry Mom in her pajamas holding tape and remote and a pair of scissors to do battle with the tv It won’t turn off “I’m gonna tape the sensor . . . ” Years it’s wavered in and out lullingly perfect and then click the picture rolls on again click roll on click so she has to rain dance in front of it war dance crack the remote like a whip again again to kill it She can’t get it to the shop and they won’t come to her “They told me the sensor’s the key . . . ” kneeling in front of it cutting and taping “this way I can see where it is . . . ” She’d turned on me enraged when I suggested she buy a new one take out $300 of the money she’s willing to me and get one that works Enraged as if I were betraying her She ignores me now when I tell her she can see the sensor perfectly well it’s just not working “Please! . . . I’ve thought this through . . . I know what I’m doing . . . ” Two crooked white streaks of tape beneath the screen Mona Lisa’s mustache They pull at me grotesque a stammer scribble stain But my mother’s all high rolling energy “We’ll see what’s gonna happen here . . . You Muddah! . . . ” imitating her Uncle Aurel’s Romanian accent old family tagline “I know how to use my tuchas! . . . ” another joke Mom’s aging head a bulb lit from within with Romanian blood Granma Stanley Dotty Mac her ancestral invincibility The tv though still doesn’t work It rolls back on demonically click back click until she has to kneel in front of it pressing the power button with a pen tip twenty seconds to drive a stake through its heart She falls back exhausted in Pop’s chair staring at the set in furious thought while I try to ignore her crawl back into my head when “Oh, look! . . . ” a flickering of red light at the screen’s left edge She’s forward bird dog on point interval then that ominous red burst flickers again S.o.s. from the ineffable inside? I’m into it now too We sit there together silent breath held as if the screen were a deep evening sky and we were scanning it for heat lightning shooting stars ...