Monument

Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath Do not hang your head or clench your fists when even your friend, after hearing the story, says, My mother would never put up with that.   Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, more often, a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered. The hundredth time   your father says, But she hated violence, why would she marry a guy like that???—?? don’t waste your breath explaining, again,   how abusers wait, are patient, that they don’t beat you on the first date, sometimes not even the first few years of a marriage.   Keep an impassive face whenever you hear Stand by Your Man, and let go your rage when you recall those words were advice   given your mother. Try to forget the first trial, before she was dead, when the charge was only attempted murder; don’t belabor   the thinking or the sentence that allowed her ex-husband’s release a year later, or the juror who said, It’s a domestic issue??—??   they should work it out themselves. Just breathe when, after you read your poems about grief, a woman asks, Do you think   your mother was weak for men? Learn to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought- cloud above your head, dark and heavy   with the words you cannot say; let silence rain down. Remember you were told, by your famous professor, that you should   write about something else, unburden yourself of the death of your mother and just pour your heart out in the poems.   Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that reliquary??—??blood locket and seedbed??—??and contend with what it means, the folk saying   you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: that one does not bury the mother’s body in the ground but in the chest, or??—??like you??—??   you carry her corpse on your back.    I from DOMESTIC WORKLimen All day I’ve listened to the industry of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree just outside my window. Hard at his task,   his body is a hinge, a door knocker to the cluttered house of memory in which I can almost see my mother’s face.   She is there, again, beyond the tree, its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves, hanging wet sheets on the line??—??each one   a thin white screen between us. So insistent is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be looking for something else??—??not simply   the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work, tireless, making the green hearts flutter.  Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky   It is 1965. I am not yet born, only a fullness beneath the Empire waist of my mother’s blue dress.   The ruffles at her neck are waves of light in my father’s eyes. He carries a slim volume, leather-bound, poems   to read as they walk. The long road past the college, through town, rises and falls before them,   the blue hills shimmering at twilight. The stacks at the distillery exhale, and my parents breathe evening air   heady and sweet as Kentucky bourbon. They are young and full of laughter, the sounds in my mother’s throat   rippling down into my blood. My mother, who will not reach forty-one, steps into the middle   of a field, lies down among clover and sweet grass, right here, right now??—?? dead center of her life.  Family Portrait Before the picture man comes Mama and I spend the morning cleaning the family room. She hums Motown, doles out chores, a warning??—??  He has no legs, she says. Don’t stare. I’m first to the door when he rings. My father and uncle lift his chair onto the porch, arrange his things   near the place his feet would be. He poses our only portrait??—??my father sitting, Mama beside him, and me in between. I watch him bother   the space for knees, shins, scratching air as??—??years later??—??I’d itch for what’s not there.