This poem originally appeared in The Akros Review, a literary journal of the English Department at The University of Akron Spring 2000 issue
Great-gram told stories of world travel—
dancing in Kyoto
under cherry blossom shadows,
collecting hearts and tea cups.
In New York
flaunting her
short-cropped, red-dyed curls and
flapper-beaded dress, she smoked cigars
for the shock value and killed the taste
with whiskey, neat.
Late years she spent in Sydney
softly singing along with the tenors in
that seashell of an opera house.
Even in the nursing home,
when white curls framed her parchment face,
she sang bawdy songs to the old men
and flirted famously.
Grandma told stories of a Dakota farmwife.
She fed seven children
and fifteen field hands
three meals a day,
even on Sunday.
When she moved to Milwaukee
she couldn’t part with her gardens, so
the empty lot next door became
her vegetable paradise—
where she put us through weeding hell.
Her mantle clock chimed like Christmas,
on her glass shelves Goebel children paraded
while she served us tea with brandy and
studied Victorian elegance.
Mama told stories of following my airman father,
base to base, cross-country—
Georgia
to Texas to Michigan,
with all she owned in two tired suitcases
and a cocker spaniel in the back seat
giving birth. In Detroit, by daylight,
she was a efficiency in hospital white.
By night, in smoky jazz clubs,
she’d whirl around dance floors while Daddy
drank Irish coffee and romanced the waitress.
By the flicker of late-night black and whites she
whispered about Fred and Ginger, Deanna Durbin,
and her hard-lost dreams of Hollywood.
My daughters will tell stories of their mother—
the smell of morning coffee over a wakeup call of
Showboat blues and Madam Butterfly;
trekking through the backyard jungle, stalking
tomatoes and basil for sauce, green peas that
we sit and eat raw; therapeutic
tea-parties to talk out broken hearts;
then being dragged off in fantastic costume
to Renaissance balls, learning set and turn
and the proper way to curtsey, with
hands held out
for courtly kissing.
