Poems For My Mother, by Sarah Puglisi

Poems For My Mother

The Story Went

She took at least one bus
Maybe two
Getting to the hospital
The day Sylvia was born

I still see her face
As it lit
With recognition she beheld
This amazing daughter delivered

My best accomplishment
To date
Mom seemed so young
In my memory of that day

Dressed in her heels and silken blouse.
My baby
With her turtle neck turning to see
Blotches, flushed red skin.

Grandma never forgot
Her coming
We'd air the story together
Every September 9th.

But this year I told it
To myself
Quietly, remembering
Her being there for me.




Astrologer

Age of Aquarius
Her collection of ephemerus
Your rising and falling
Charted, plotted, star studded
What was the ascendant?
Why were you dependant?
Where was Saturn housed
Which planet opposed Mars?
T-square or some affliction
Mom analyzed with her conviction.





Green Raincoat

Big
Round
Buttons
London Fog,
Olive
A frame
Scarf
Her cause.



All Things She Loved

All things she loved
Stick in my brain
Avocadoes, cookbooks
Doylestown, baskets
Oranges and mandarins
Le Cage Aux Folles
Pillows and her pottery
(And sort of hypocritically- horse races)
Reading especially, her papers
Details, facts
Southern writers
Pecans, fudge, Hershey bars
Mr. Pisto on the pier
Rock collections, birds, her oriole
Blue blooms, our children
Recipes, a shrimp cocktail
Cerviche
Uncle Tony, Aunt Lenore
Ferne, Gladys and Jane
A game of bridge
Charlotte, Norma -all her friends
Hydrangeas and viennas.

Each day her favorites
Remain.




Loss of Innocence


With the logic of childhood
I keep repeating,
"I miss you so much Momma."
Too much.

At 85 her passing
Shy a granddaughter's 24th birthday
Pokes holes in my notions
Of life

A naivete she wove
Right into my heart
Looking for some fair play 
Escaping chance

Everything changes
The day a mother dies
One ages while the other
Looks on.

A child emerging
Restless, careening out of control
Fumbling with a medical cap
Dependant again

The cat wants to walk outside, Mom
Around the house
Sniffing each spot you sat in
Just yesterday.



Not Quite A Malaprop

It was  a cas- e-tas
Or a burr-e-ta
On a tor- till-a, (pronounce those L's)
The hawk she called an "Owl"
Pasta was past
With an "ah" at the end. 
Yes, we teased her for it
Sometimes about offering
Ed's Amy over lima beans
Or Natch-Oh's with cheese.

I'd give  A LOT
To hear her say
Cheat-ohs
Or get me a Clean-x,
Put out my crowns to color
with today.






Divorce
divides the heart,
house, wallet
And ultimately
the mind.

She lost
on every front
but one
He split
and that was
Ultimately
fun.




Conversation

You seemed to set down in
The middle of something
Charles Sheeler in Buck's County
Looking at a barn
When she began to
Interrogate you about
The relationship to light
Or some relative that might
Have roamed the Doylestown street
Sometime, the boy Michner
Grandma once knew
You'd be piecing this
Puzzle back into meaning
While she moved on
Frustrated with your lagging
A question to clarify,
on your part,
Might be rapidly
Spoken over
Initiating another line of thought,
Until some insight
Revealed a shift in form
And her meanings
Could be absorbed.




"What Is Man?"

Mom wasn't buying into
The Existentialists
When she penned
My high school
Essay on our
Inner nature
That failed
With a comma splice.

She simply wafted
On in romantic form
About heights
with poetry
That roared,
"Your Mom wrote
this."
Right after
The Civil War.

But I took
The paper in
Handing off to Mr. Hohmann
With no
Thought of a
Rescue from
His scorn.

She'd tried all
Night
My edit into final form
Told me
we'd face
Man's red pen.

Still that afternoon
She looked up
Expectantly,
"How did we do?"
I lied
And said,
"Brilliantly."