STAINSWith red clay between my toes,and the sun setting over my head,the ghost of my mother blows in,riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,riding on a honeysuckle breeze.Her teeth, the keys of a piano.I play her grinning ivory noteswith cadenced fumbling fingers,splattered with paint, textured with scars.A song rises up from the belly of my pastand rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life:blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk;She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow;Its brilliance nearly blinds me.My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years.The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun.A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye.For there is no truth in spoken farewells.I am pregnant with a poem,my life lost in its stanzas.My mama steps out of her dressand drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.She stands alone: bathed, blooming,burdened with nothing of this world.Her body is naked and beautiful,her wings gray and scorched,her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.I watch her departure, her flapping wings:She doesn’t look back, not even once,not even to whisper my name: Brenda.I lick the teeth of my piano mouth.With a painter’s hands,with a writer’s handswith rusty wrinkled hands,with hands soaked in the joys,the sorrows, the spillsof my mother’s life,I pick up eighty-one years of stainsAnd pull her dress over my head.Her stains look good on me.
Brenda Sutton Rose
mother, mother-and-daughter, music, poetry, southern-literature