Three Poems
by Ruth Stone

Speaking to My Dead Mother

At two A.M. in Binghamton, it's quiet.
I did not comfort you with one last kiss.
Your death was my death. Instinct ran riot.
I ran. Didn't hold your hand at the abyss.
My life had gone like grass fire; like the trees
in drought, caught in the burning wind. And June
returns, another cycled year. Sweet-peas,
dahlias, phlox; the orchard I can't prune;
your small garden gloves, remnants of crystal
stemware. It wears away. I cannot bar
the passage. Jewelweed shoots its pistol
pouch of seeds and the storm, like a guitar,
thrums over the mountain. All that brooded,
ignorant in your safe arms, concluded.

The Awakening

Once when you turned to me and wound my hair
About my face, and in the dark your face
Was only a live felt thing, fear wrapped me too,
Disembodied arms held me in the bed's soft space.
Until you spoke, savagery crushed my throat,
And death like the snake slipped into our embrace.

Then by the light that later came cold
From the window, I saw you turned away
Asleep like a wax image, all of a color gray
And eyes shut down from all entwining, a fold
Of sheet between us, and my heart leaped up
To hear your voice, but your breath came easy, easy,
And your hands plucked aside my hair that brushed your face.
And there was a falling away from memory out of embrace.

How Aunt Maud Took to Being a Woman

A long hill sloped down to Aunt Maud's brick house.
You could climb an open stairway up the back
to a plank landing where she kept her crocks of wine.
I got sick on stolen angelfood cake and green wine
and slept in her feather bed for a week.
Nobody said a word. Aunt Maud just shifted
the bottles. Aunt's closets were all cedar lined.
She used the same pattern for her house dresses—
thirty years. Plain ugly, closets full of them,
you could generally find a new one cut and laid
out on her sewing machine. She preserved,
she canned. Her jars climbed the basement walls.
She was a vengeful housekeeper. She kept the blinds
pulled down in the parlor. Nobody really walked
on her hardwood floors. You lived in the kitchen.
Uncle Cal spent a lot of time on the back porch
waiting to be let in.