Another poem set in Nova Scotia where
I spent my earliest years.
We lived in a house that had no indoor plumbing.
And we had a wood stove.
It meant that my mother worked very hard.
And she would, after dinner, go outside and smoke a cigarette.
A time when she was not to be disturbed.
I grew up feeling guilty about those moments I watched
my mother in her solitary rapture,
if that's what it could be called.
"My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer."
One.
"When the moon appears and a few wind stricken barns
stand out in the low domed hills and shine
with a light that is veiled and dust filled
and it floats upon the fields, my mother with her hair
in a bun, her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close to the faint yellow sheen
of her dress, stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light down through the sedges.
The last gray islands of cloud taken from view,
and the wind ruffling the moon's ash colored coat
on the black bay."
Two.
"Soon, the house, with its shades drawn closed,
will send small carpets of lamp glow into the haze.
And the bay will begin its loud heaving.
And the pines, frayed finials climbing the hill,
will seem to graze the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the star lanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing.
And as she gazes under the hour's spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay that tear at the folding flesh.
And she will not know why she is here
or what she is prisoner of if not the conditions of love that
brought her to this."
Three.
"My mother will go indoors and the fields, the bare stones,
will drift in peace.
Small creatures, the mouse and the swift,
will sleep at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up, repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch, to the rusted screens,
to the air, to the rimless dark, to the sea that
keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The Earth is not yet a garden about to be turned.
The stars are not yet bells that ring at night for the lost.
It is much too late."