Mother's Milk Jesse Graves
A couple of things she gave me: powdered formula mixed with water heated on a stove but held very near her heart while I drank it; the certainty that Jimmy Carter should have been president for life and that a yellow, stuffed, or dead dog would be better than Ronald Reagan. * * * By the time I was born she was fully in charge, the family had moved back to Sharps Chapel, bought her grandfather’s old house. My mother conducted a small orchestra whose members who relied on her for every need: her sister, set out with three kids in a falling down trailer; her uncle, speaking mostly to relatives already dead; an aunt across the ridge whose husband tried to shoot my brother. Wild brother, wrecking every car and girl who came his way. My wallflower sister dreaming a way through high school. My father home one day a week, that spent clearing fields or fixing the ancient tractor. And me, my late birth the counter weight to her father’s early death. * * * My grandmother’s birthday today, same as stately old Richard Wilbur. Their lives begun a few hours apart, one spent tracing the beautiful lines etched in the faces of baroque fountains, envisioning angels in the laundry, the other sweeping out hospital waiting rooms, her second job after years glazing porcelain conductors to crown the tops of telephone poles. One life creating my mother, the other rendering Moliere in English. * * * I stepped out of the airport in Syracuse into the first darts of a swirling snow the whole western skyline dropping fast back in lake effect country $38 in my wallet home further away than the moon Sunday after Thanksgiving * * * Once I tripped over a barbed wire fence, both legs tangled between the strands, six years old, struck down by the first mountain I thought I could climb. She carried me home, my shins wrapped in a t-shirt and my ear close against her pulse, tears starting to dry on both our faces. * * * A few other things she gave me: an ear for slightly off-pitch singing notes left lingering in throats from Loretta Lynn to Lucinda Williams ill-advised loyalty to women who pay half-interested attention to me wear choppy haircuts and just-visible tattoos an avalanche of love and kindness the worst preparation a man can get for this world’s embrace. |
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