dual personalities

“and for your penance, translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.”*

Although I think of my mother every day, Mother’s Day is an occasion to give a special thought to the woman who loved me fiercely and without ebb.

My mother taught me to like poetry. (I certainly did not learn to at school.) She liked to read poems out loud and she liked to write them.

She never really got around to teaching me to cook or sew or really anything very practical, but we watched a lot of movies together and listened to a lot of records and talked about a lot of books we read. We took long drives together and went out to lunch. We went shopping and went to art museums and pointed out the things we liked. Pretty much this is what I did with my own children while they were growing up and still do whenever we can.

We pass down the love of poetry and a predilection for historical fiction and biography as well as the old furniture and handmade dresses. We pass on the love.

Here’s a favorite poem by one of my faves, Jorge Luis Borges, which seems particularly resonant on Mother’s Day.

From a lineage of Protestant ministers

and South American soldiers

who fought, with their incalculable dust,

against the Spaniards and the desert’s lances,

I am and I am not. My true lineage

Is the voice, which I can still hear, of my father

celebrating Swinburne music,

and the great volumes I have leafed through,

leafed through and never read, which was enough.

I am whatever the philosophers told me.

Chance or destiny, those two names

for a secret thing we’ll never understand,

lavished me with homelands: Buenos Aires,

Nara, where I spent a single night,

Geneva, Iceland, the two Cordobas…

I am the hollow solitary dream

in which I lose or try to lose myself,

the bondage between two twilights,

the old mornings, the first

time I saw the sea or an ignorant moon,

without its Virgil and without its Galileo.

I am every instant of my lengthy time,

every night of scrupulous insomnia,

Every parting and every night before.

I am the faulty memory of an engraving

That’s still here in the room and that my eyes,

Now darkened, once saw clearly:

The Knight, Death, and the Devil.

I am that other one who saw the desert

and in its eternity goes on watching it.

I am a mirror, an echo. The epitaph.

–“Yesterdays” translated by Stephen Kessler

*Seamus Heaney, “Station Island XI”