Where Are You Going My Little One, Pretty One?

Jennie Meyer

Today as I walk the beach

I pick up broken glass— 

bright and sharp like fishhooks,

not quite smooth enough 

not small enough

not broken up enough,

recent shards,

not yet rolled by thunderous waves

into opaque beach glass.

I spot a splash of ruby plastic,

and yet, my rubbing fingers uncover

a rose petal instead, red and tattered,

weighted with sand, a fragment

from some recent celebration—

Mother’s Day perhaps.

This May I brought my mother two magnolias

floating in a crystal bowl of water,

drove them to her as the water sloshed

out from the potholes on my road,

filled it back up in her bathroom,

the petals floppy and sodden,

placed it in front of her,

knowing she would applaud 

the unusual presentation, the drama—

told her one was me 

and the other, my brother.

My mother is barely here—

hair matted to head,

face pressed on food tray

at her place at the kitchen table,

so she can close her eyes, 

block out all confounding stimuli,

try to follow the looping strand

of my father’s and my conversation.

My feet soak in the hot, dry sand 

above the high tide line

where a pair of underwear

is caked in a clump.

I do my best to pick up trash on this beach, 

but I draw the line at tampons and underpants.

And yet, now I join my mother in her toileting,

pull down her depends, wipe,

as she asks, incredulous, 

Are you my daughter?

My mother was once a brilliant 

shard of broken glass.  

Now she’s small, opaque and round,

smoothed down, pummeled

by the waves of time.

On my walk back down the tide line

I find another crimson rose petal,

pocket it, as if it could fill

me with a pure, unfurling love.

I can pat my mother now

on the soft down of her head,

tell her I love her,

no longer slice my fingers

on her, nor prick my heart

on glinting edges,

no longer fleeing our visits

hating us both.

As a girl I was a muted-brown periwinkle

next to an exotic Venus fan.

Yet elaborate coral, over time, 

                                even if a whole lifetime,

is ground to sand.

I can almost scoop my mother up now,

sift her between my fingers, marvel 

at her scattered sparkles in the sun,

touch the tenderness that always ducked 

beneath her consuming tentacles,

her barnacled will to cling.

The waves roll in, shushing, soothing

like a lullaby.  Silken, sleepy sunbeams

ride in on their backs.

When my mother closes her eyes,

lays her cheek on the table,

she opens her ear like a great conch shell

drawing in the murmuring swirl of her world.

I read to her in my kitchen now,

as when I was a girl and read Little Women

while she washed a sink full of dishes.

The caregivers talk to her so 

honeysuckle sweet—

a language foreign to me.

But I read to the mind that 

basked and swayed 

on intricate lattices of words.

Head down, she listens, 

responds in simple terms,

yet still defines words I don’t know—

what drenches the mind early is the last to go.

I lean over to pluck a little purple shell 

that matches the whorls on my sundress, 

drop it in my pocket

with the Carmen-colored rose petal, 

as if somehow, I could cradle 

my mother and me

together.

I dip my bare feet in a tidal pool,

cool around a boulder.

These days there’s none of the posturing—

the magnificent shell’s impenetrable architecture, 

the man-o-war’s sting—

just mother and daughter

sitting together.

I drop the glass shards on a rock

at the entrance to the beach,

so no one will get cut.

They ring on the granite like wine glasses,

half- and almost empty, clinking.

If my mother were a smaller thing, 

I could pull her onto my lap, rock her, 

sing the lullaby she once sang to me—