One Secret Thing (7 page)

It was like witnessing the earth being formed,

to see my mother die, like seeing

the dry lands be separated

from the oceans, and all the mists bear up

on one side, and all the solids

be borne down, on the other, until

the body was all there, all bronze and

petrified redwood opal, and the soul all

gone. If she hadn’t looked so exalted, so

beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly

hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond

hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so

much, since I had met her, I do not

know how I would have stood it, without

fighting someone, though no one was there

to fight, death was not there except

as her, my task was to hold her tiny

crown in one cupped hand, and her near

birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,

nests. Winds, stems, tongues.

Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,

my mother’s dying was like an end

of life on earth, some end of water

and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,

till only that still, ocher moon

shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.

I remember the parting as if she had been

a gilded balsa crucifix, not

4’ 11” but four and eleven-twelfths

inches, like a pale rattle a baby

could hold in her hand. Sometimes I look back and it’s as

if I left a scepter lying

in the hospice bed, or a dowser of my mother,

but it was her body—although someone,

when my back had been turned, had laid her out

at parade rest,

her fleshless paws folded across her

goddess gate—pussycat,

where have you been? When I left her, she was at

stiff attention, beginning to warp

like outer space at its outer limits.

Feet start walking, something told

my feet, everyone was leaving, and I

deserted her,
I will not let thee

go except thou bless me.
Of course she had

blessed me—but while my legs went scissor-soft-

scissor, so that the butter walls

were melting past me, I could not count

my blessings, the feet that had stroked inside her

were being conveyed by the galilee floor toward the

door into night. It was like walking

away from someone who is drowning in inches

of water—and I’d bent beside her, and called to the

morphine to drown her, she had lain face up in the

cloud of it lowered like a pool to her face.

It was time. It was past midnight, the air of the

quiet town was wild with fresh salt

sea and pine. Never again.

Always. Never again. Always.

Blowing from the Pacific—that pattern

piece of the globe’s blue dress—blowing

from the Occident waters, from the Bay, from the tide flats,

the willet, heron, reed, mussel,

scallop, fault—at overcast dawn,

the western wind is bringing small,

dark clouds, up the slope

to the coastal hills dense with calcium

fog, and I wonder if any of the little

puffs is the smoke of my mother’s flesh, from

the downwind crematorium

where her body lies this morning. When I saw it

last, it had diminished and hardened down

from what, at the end, had appeared to have become

a little singing sea on little

sea legs. The longer her body was dead,

the more it petrified—elkhorn,

kindling. This morning it bursts into High

C’s of flame, this morning the complex

pastoral scene—nymph, trailing

diaphan, ibis, rill, pearl—

the solar system of my mother, the beauty of her

orbs, is fed, feet or head

first, into the Shadrach Meshach

Abednego, there to be divided

in two, the bed of gentle ash

rough with shards, radius and molars,

and the genies of buttery vapor, the fume

spirits—torn right through, in places,

showing the veery-egg blue—flying

slowly, low, up over the hills

on their way to the ice fields.

In the narrow office on Shattuck and Ashby,

the woman pulled open a file drawer,

low tumble of wheels on rails,

and took out the ashes, in a satin maroon

plastic box, and set them on the desk.

Next of kin, I signed, and lifted them

up, and in the car I clasped her

tight, my arms seemed encircled around

the container twice, three times. Then I held her

up to my ear, and tilted her,

to hear whatever I could hear of her,

shirr of wisdom-teeth, of kiln bed

grit, dry mince like the crab-claws that she would

shuck to give us the brine-meat—gravel

rustle. The minister opened the chapel,

we set her where she’d always sat,

we put a rose beside her like

a petticoat. Then there she was,

on the sequoia pew, a magenta carton of

mortar-and-pestled bones. That it should

come to this. I kissed the smooth

surface, under which her silver

constellations turned, and then it was

time to leave her, overnight,

as we had planned, but it was hard to leave her

by herself, but suddenly, I saw

she had always been alone—fatherless,

mismothered—and not without her own

valiant spirit. And I wished she could descant

all night, as if this were she, this rattle of

salty campfire rubble from inside her,

and I left her there, I relinquished her

to the strangeness, the still home, of matter.

Early in the morning, we went through her garden,

filling bags with sempervirens,

sequoia, cedar, sugar pine, larch,

tearing each blown rose off its core,

dropping in cones, tiny lemons,

gardenia knobs, and the minister said,

Blessed are the Dead who Die in the Lord,

for they Rest from their Labors,

and we took the pint of her hearth-fluff to the Bay and cast

off into the fog. Cormorant, pelican,

tern, egret, whimbrel, we took her past

cliff and scoured-out tide tunnel,

staying in the lee of the mouth, and then we came

out, into chop and swell, like a rearing

horse on a heavy-seas carousel,

the boat was toward the open sea,

I pressed her square bucket of cinders

against my belly, the engine cut,

the prow swung slow around, the wind

dropped, and someone said, It’s time.

And then I knew I was about to lose her,

she was going, there was no stopping it,

and it bent me over, Give Rest, O Christ,

to thy Servant, with thy Saints,

where Sorrow and Pain are no more, nor Sighing—

he held the box to me, and my mother

was violet-gray, she was blue spruce,

twilight, fur, I ran my hand into the

evening talcum of her absent action, and there

came, sharp up, with shards, and powders,

a tangle of circles soldered together,

the triple-strand wedding ring

from her finger touched me, now, on the other

side of the fire. I held it a moment

and then I loosed it overboard

in its damp puff of her parted flesh,

which blew in a cloud of starshine, and plunged

like milk into the water. Dust thou Art, and unto

Dust shalt thou Return, and he shook

the rest of her out, We Commit her Body

to the Deep. And we took the sack of blossoms and we

reached in, dropping brightness and limp

buoyant alloys in a trail above where her

rusts and corrids had gone, we laid down

a fresh path, we let her go,

we ushered her forth, like the death of a god,

the birth of an exhausted holiday.