December '04 Featured Poet: Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Two
Poems: "Photo of My Sister as a Young Woman" and "Your
Voice on the Phone Wobbles"
PHOTO OF MY SISTER AS A YOUNG WOMAN
My cousin says "you’re the last
person alive from my childhood"
and we both nearly begin
to cry, two ladies heading out
for lunch
in my cousin’s sleek new
convertible. Before
she starts the car she hands me
an
old photograph. At the
forefront my sister looks
out at the camera. In the photo
she is twenty-five, just
married. I had forgotten
how exquisitely beautiful she
was as a girl,
her full sensuous lips, her large
chocolate brown
eyes, the sweetheart curve of
her face, her Marilyn Monroe
body, Elizabeth Taylor face.
Waves of energy come off her.
By the time she died at sixty-
two, she had lost all that,
crippled
and in a wheelchair, she
struggled against
the narrowing frame of her life,
retreated
gradually away from friends,
ashamed
of her hands twisted and
crooked, her feet
so distorted that she had to
wear ugly shoes specially made
for her. When she was a girl,
her legs slender, her size five
feet beautifully formed, she
loved high heels, loved to
dance,
twirling around the dance floor
doing the rumba and the
jitterbug. When we were
young, we’d
ride around in my cousin’s used
car, an old
black Ford her father bought for
her, my sister,
her friend Florence, my cousin,
riding out of
the constricted Paterson streets
to the wider,
country lanes of Bergen
County. We thought
it would be as easy as that, our
lives changed
by magic if we found the man
we longed for. We were the
Happily Ever After girls,
believed
in that myth as though it were
carved in stone.
I hold my sister’s picture in my
hand, but the
weight of that past, those 50’s
girls, the way happiness is like
water, you cannot hold it
in your hand. We did not know
then that like our mothers,
those women we vowed we’d
never be, we’d have to learn to
make do.
YOUR VOICE ON THE PHONE WOBBLES
Your voice on the phone
wobbles and sounds tight as
one of the strings of your
guitar,
the one you used to play when
you could still sing. From my
motel room, I try to soothe
away your shaking, as I would
if I were at home with you,
smoothing my hand across your
shoulders until the muscles
unknot. "Where are you?" I ask,
and you say you’re upstairs at
your
computer. I can tell you are
frantic
because the message you’re
trying to send
to the Computer Help Line
keeps getting erased by
accident. Your hands no longer
work
the way you want them to. I
am afraid you will fall
downstairs in your distraction,
the lady who
helps you already gone home.
Last week you insisted you
could walk. It was only ten
in the morning, and you said
you could always walk until at
least 11:30. I drive you
to the drugstore. We walk
inside. I get a cart
for you to lean on, but you
don’t want it. I leave
you standing in an aisle looking
for shaving lotion. I am
looking at the rows of cough
medicine and cold remedies
when I hear a crash. I rush into
the next aisle and find you
struggling
to get up from the floor. I help
you up, try to talk you into
leaning on this cart. You
refuse.
Two minutes later, you fall
again, the way you do, fall as
though you were a felled tree,
stiff
and straight and hit the ground
hard. I pretend
I don’t notice people staring at
us. Tonight
with your voice so ragged, I try
to talk you
into going downstairs to your
chair, try
to get you to give up on the
computer
and to sit reading a book. I feel
like your
mother, scolding and prodding.
I don’t know the exact day or
year when things changed
like this between us. They say
in each relationship the person
who loves the most
gives all the power to the one
who does not care as much. I
was besotted with you, bent
myself
to your will. Maybe it was this
illness, your need of me
suddenly greater than mine for
you,
that made me seem more
valuable to you, more
cherished, so I can tell that two
days since
I left home, you need me back,
the way
you never would have needed
me
when we were young.
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