Upon discovering my mother’s death one morning




While out walking this morning,
I stumbled upon my mother’s death,
very close in distance and pitch to my own,
come to find out.
So she had come looking for me,
only to die, as well.
First, it had been my brazen rook
of a brother.
Setting out to find me, he had been struck down
with a horrible shuffling of the red whip
and flowers falling after.
And now my mother, too.

I found her lying next to an oak,
an unruly human root.
Her wrinkled feet were bare,
and she wore her favorite yellow dress,
arms folded across flat breasts,
lips keyed with light.
With her eyes closed, she looked
like an old angel, blue in the face and fingers.
I wondered how long she’d been dead.

Looking at her body, at her little raisin toes,
I was hit with the bricks of my youth.
They swam before me,
smacking into one another like beautiful brown bats.
This woman, now reduced to a sack of
useless bone and empty vein,
lacking kinetics and all harmony,
even in her plagued death still shook me
about like an old rug, dust shooting out
like stars on the line.
I hated her for it.

Staring up into the sun,
I could hear barking dogs,
and a car door slam,
and seeing no other inevitable,
I fell forward, and
let gravity send me home.


*****

The Nature of Loss





It is an abrupt thing,
this murder of time.

We talk of Wollstonecraft
And her Vindication of the Rights of Women,
when a siren begins to beat backward into the night,
an imperative wave without a name.

He turns and looks at the open window
as if it should close itself,
and when it doesn’t,
he rises,
and does it seamlessly,
as if written into the lecture.

As the pane locks into place,
the room is dead for a moment,
but then the chorus is back,
softer this time,
as if embarrassed of itself, of its loudness.

He sits and starts again,
this time about mothers and children,
and the awful responsibility of it all,
and soon the siren is gone.
It is as if it had never begun,
but something is lost.
I cannot name it, this thing,
but it is surely gone from me, for good.

****

Old Woman, Café, Sunday Brunch


It was her fingers I saw first,
coming into view through the front window of the café,
fingers clamped onto the hand of a young black man -
a paper heart held by strong branches.
He helped her down the tricky brick steps.

This was years ago,
but I will forever remember what she wore.
Black tartan tights, black knee-high leather boots,
black long-sleeved jersey shirt, white slip dress
with a lace band around her waist,
and a black felt hat with a black felt flower.
The hat was at an angle, down over her right eye.
Her hair was white fire, crimped and longish,
coming to rest on her slumped shoulders.
It was clear that in her old life,
the one without mistakes,
she had been pretty.

She walked in slowly and sat down at the table
next to ours.  I was with my parents.
We had just gotten our food and I was trying not to stare.
I had a pita filled with warm sausage and scrambled egg.
There was a small salad with lettuce and tomato,
doused with vinaigrette.  I was starving, but I wanted to watch her.
I was compelled to watch her.

I turned slightly to see her fumbling with her purse, black patent leather.
She struggled to open it, like a child with a pill bottle.
I almost asked if I could help, but she got it.
She pulled out two bills: a ten and a one.
She brought each bill up to her face,
looking at it intently,
the curator of her heart’s museum, looking at bones.
She ran her fingers over the wrinkled bills one at a time,
trying to smooth out the blemishes, trying to read the writing.
I looked at my mother.
“She’s blind,” I mouthed.
My mother nodded and glanced at the floor.  I followed.
The woman’s feet kicked at a white plastic stick, the bottom dipped in
red.
I had missed that.

Her waiter came over and I heard
the woman’s voice, high and small,
like a mouse’s vocals.
She said,
“I’ll have coffee with skim milk
and two iced lattes with skim milk.”
He left and she got up slowly, without her stick,
and started walking back toward the bathroom.
She seemed to know where she was going.
She had been here before.

When she was gone, my mother said
“She looks older than her years.”

Soon, she came back and walked even slower,
looking up and down the rows of seats.
“She can’t find her seat,” I whispered.
For a moment, I was worried for her, embarrassed.
But she found it.

Her drinks had arrived by then.  She sipped
her hot coffee with a spoon, bringing her face down
as close to the steaming mug as possible.
Then she drank her iced lattes quickly,
as if in a newly discovered hurry,
sucking brown water through the clear straw.
This was all with pain.
There was mutual pain in that place.

We left a few moments later, bill paid,
bellies full, the semifinal games waiting for us.

Later, my mother would say,
(in the car, on the way back to the house),
“Her eyes were like milk, the right one completely gone.”


*****

John Pennisi is a 23-year-old schoolteacher and graduate student.  He
currently lives in Maryland, the state in which he's lived his whole life.  
He graduated from Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina in 2005
with a degree in Biology.  He is currently in his last semester of graduate
studies at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland where he will earn a
Master's of English in August of this year.  He has published in the Santa
Clara Review, the art and literary journal produced at Santa Clara
University in northern California.  He is currently at work completing his
first major collection of poems, The London Notebooks, a collection he began
while studying abroad in London during his senior year of college.  "I never
really understood what my life was supposed to be about until I went away
from America.  Now that I'm back, I'm focused to a fault."  John will be
spending the majority of this coming summer in Paris, beginning a new
collection.  He lists Anne Sexton as a major influence.

John Pennisi