I watch my mother living, which means
I watch my mother dying,
her body still a good ship, her mind
at the helm, steady most of the time,
save those times when she clutches
a certain worry. My mother worries
she has had no forebear to show her
how to live this long, grow this old.
When I ask her for another memory
from before I was born, she brings up her trip
to Norway when she was sixteen, a train
to New York, a boat across the ocean.
On the other side of my mother’s bed
I sit and listen. Next, she says she has finished
a load of laundry, eaten half a breakfast,
read the Sunday paper. My mother of pie crusts
and wrench sets is eighty-nine
and tired. You, I tell my mother,
are a pioneer, showing the rest of us
how this works. I watch my words, hiding
my own questions, knots in my chest.
You, I tell myself, breathe.
My mother shrinks in her clothes,
her hearing leaving, and her teeth.
On some days, my mother, who traveled and knit
and worried, sounds like someone else
until she laughs, and I hear the mom I knew.
Driving home, I’m beaten
by sunlight pouring through the windshield.
After the months of lockdown,
to see my mother is a blessing, and on some days,
in the blessing, I am wrecked.
–
Joannie Stangeland is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Scene You See. Her poems have also appeared in Two Hawks Quarterly, SWWIM, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and other journals. Joannie holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop.