dual personalities

oh antic God

return to me

my mother in her thirties

leaned across the front porch

the huge pillow of her breasts

pressing against the rail

summoning me in for bed.

 

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

 

I can barely recall her song

the scent of her hands

though her wild hair scratches my dreams

at night.   return to me, oh Lord of then

and now, my mother’s calling,

her young voice humming my name.

–Lucille Clifton

June 26 was the 30th anniversary of our mother’s death. As a day it doesn’t mean that much to me, because I think of her every day.

I see her in me and in my children and in other people. I read her books and wear her jewelry. I sometimes get out her dishes and use them. I watch movies that we watched together. I am reminded of what she said and thought about things.

I went to the memorial service of a 96-year old friend the other day. Her adult granddaughter spoke lovingly about her and related how when she was a child, she would visit her grandparents in the summer. She would go to the grocery store with her grandmother, who would drive with her hand on her granddaughter’s leg. I thought of my mother and of myself, who did the same thing (and still do sometimes!) with our children–that wordless pat of affection saying, I’m so happy you are here with me.

“We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

–Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

*Robert Louis Stevenson, from “To My Mother”