I think I'll read a poem from my first book
having to do with my mother because I'm going to be ending
on a poem about my father.
So this goes back to adolescence,
the time I said I'd like to write about occasionally.
And it also has this theme of imagination like the last poem.
Because I grew up in this place with no movie theaters
and restaurants, it was pretty dull.
And I guess I read a lot of books for that reason.
And my mother used to tell stories about her childhood.
This poem begins with one of her stories about her childhood.
And then it switches in part 2 to my own adolescence.
And it's really about the inner life and fantasy and the world
of the imagination as refuge.
From our Mary-- our Mary, Mary was my mother.
From Our Mary To Me.
As a child, Mary Callahan admired storybook orphans.
Anne of Green Gables, Uncle Frank's Mary
transported from dingy asylums to wide hearted strangers,
from skimpy wincey dresses to puff sleeved splendors,
from boiled turnips to chocolate sweeties.
And noticing that all orphans had blue-black hair and eyes
and skin white as lace, she pictured them
as consumptive Spaniards flaunting veils, roses, fans,
Valentino's profile, and somehow confused their juicy lives
with Mary Daneher's, a rich girl whose carbonado hair,
peaked complexion, yellow pink orchid and blue smock
dresses with hand-stitched collars, lisle stockings
and especially patterned banded tanned suede high shoes
and maid escort to St. Patrick's School seemed orphanesque
and prevented our Mary from venturing near, much less
daring a till death true blue kindred spirit-ship the way
girls did in books.
At night, our Mary read tales that made her blood jump,
gazed through isinglass at the coal fire,
and considered her own adventures: how she'd
crawled into the bull's pasture, lost her drawers on the Green
Island Bridge, kicked them in the river,
tap danced at the recital, sat inside a freight car talking
to a tramp till it began to move,
nearly taking her to Avonlea or Kalamazoo.
Part 2.
Mary Callahan, her daughter, and her daughter's friend
are talking about love and wealth, and Mary Daneher.
Our Mary says, I'd like to see her now to see
if she has any smocking on her.
The girls are memorizing every recipe in this month's McCall's
because they haven't eaten in three days,
because they want to look thin in their minis and hip
slingers.
They are starving in hopes of having a yogic vision: a lost
Beatle, say, drives up in a psychedelic Rolls
and proposes whimsical English sex.
They are thumping their feet to imaginary drums
and thinking if John Lennon loved them they'd be skinny.
Though for that to happen, they'd have to be.
Hopeless, they are hopeless.
I see their faces pinched with wishing
and see them settling for the life they fight
or a worse life they haven't bothered to imagine.
From here, I don't know whether to love or fear them.
I'd never find my way back to that fanatic state:
upper New York Troy Michigan Dead End Avenue 67.
My mother saying, cheer up, girls,
and swishing her house dress in a mad can-can,
her legs brazenly in the air, her exit a "so there!"
flip of skirt, cape work defiant as a toreador's, leaving
me weak with laughter.
The anemic daughter, stranger to her
than any waif or ne'er do well sat next to on a train,
leaving me neither her optimism nor charm,
only imagination kicking like a worm in a jumping bean.