by A. Van Jordan
Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.
” To write this poem seems so
out of character for me, but it’s not about my mother,
as much as it’s about how, as a son, the disease
measures the changing rituals of family.
And 28 lines—all I’ve provided myself—seems so
anemic.
Now, I barely have 18 lines left for a love
I don’t have the vigor to describe.
Reticence is a disease
I’ve suffered from throughout my life.
Without family,
I don’t know what it means to live as myself, and, so,
I hide in the reflection of others, which, after all, others love:
people care more about themselves than a friend’s mother.
I mean, how does one explain to someone who’s not family
how you now see the patterns into which a parent would sew
a quilt to lay over a child, the child neither hip to love
nor Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices”?
My mother’s
silence seems like indifference except I know the disease,
which changes our relationship, the parent and child; I sow
healing from my memory of how she taught me to love,
not knowing her movement through a day as a mother,
as someone whose sole gig was to keep me alive, free of disease
and, whenever possible, embarrassment.
But now, family
means playing the parent; I’m still just a son, writing about love,
but, lowering my eyes from the trauma, I lift her body, her disease,
for a shower, straining under all the love she sowed.
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