Mother (or, A Midwestern Motif)
Katie Bullock Gawf
--- F1 ---
I am driving down I-35 North towards Iowa
when She appears. From the southbound side,
her doe's eyes meet mine against the dark glare
of headlights and I startle to see Her
watching, without blinking, staring.
Here, the night highway is supposed to be a space
Where souls are secrets kept from the soybeans.
I wonder – tense - what terrors a fellow intruder like Her
Could be capable of.
But the steam of her breath is catching, swirling
fog tendrils out into the barely illuminated mist, and I find
I am waiting for some kind of gift. As if Missouri deer aren't more common
than holy water, and our pastime isn't watching them
in hope they'll let us on to some omen of knobby
knees and bone-shaped skulls.
I stare, and
In the split-second before the bloodshed, she seems to smirk. Then,
She throws herself in front of an eighteen-wheeler.
I see red and tawny
A tumbling body lost to the undercarriage
The night resumes.
Swallowed by the stillness of
Stars glowing softly over the soybeans.
Nothing to mark the violence of the interstate plains.
--- F2 ---
I find myself of the belief
That the Midwest was imposed at gunpoint -
A vanilla flavored violence.
Everyone who accepted the sentence began to believe in
bone china, and tarnished hand-me-down wedding silver
that they'd hide in attics between stacks of dried corn husks and extra sugar,
and also under the meat,
left hung to dry after opening day of the hunt
when the 6 pm jerky parties left a singed tension to stalk you
like woodsmoke watching,
clinging to clothes that'd be fall forever now
with their acrid scents and venison stew stains
My mother grew up here
That much was clear. You could tell her Nebraska by the way
she cooked cornbread in the kitchen just to suffocate it
with a spoon of nutmeg butter and baked apples placed
on a plate painted like a cardinal and passed down
from a grandmother who also knew
what it meant to pattern something
with color as beautiful as the spilled brains of a bird.
In my house, it was a sin to rip the family quilts
so they stayed in the cedar chest, as heavy as a memory.
Along with our collection of seed pearls
and rusted bits of queen anne's lace
and black and blue eyed susans, which were my mother's favorite.
I remember my mother
Standing with the other mothers,
Laughing against the backdrop of my first field trip
When we visited the Chateau dairy
And they filed us five-year olds into a giant revolving circle
that moved in rounds always in rounds
As we grabbed cups of fresh squeezed milk flavored
like cotton-candy, cookies and cream, root beer
And spit it
into the grass, as part of our new pastime.
I looked out at the farm -
Where later we'd ride tractors and touch our first udders
Learning the motions of milking something
not all too willing - and I found a land
Exhausted of color
Except for the bright billboards smiling at us
All along the highway, on the drive home
--- F3 ---
My mother,
She always made us take our shoes with us
When the Fujita scale was mentioned.
It is what we use to categorize our calamity.
On the scale, F1 denotes a wind speed of 74 to 112 mph
Which is considered Moderate here
F2 climbs to 157 mph and this we call Considerable
F3, 206, Severe
F4 will swirl you up to 260. The damage of this, they say, is Devastating.
And then there is F5, the peak of the scale, the number 318
Beyond which there is not any difference, between
it and The Thunder of God.
It is enough to lift up a house and put it back down
Or to tear it apart with its
china and silver and sugar and corn and jerky and plates and memories and
Funnily enough, we say that this damage is Incredible.
When I was young,
We would seek shelter at the slightest mention of the storm
All of us shaken and awoken from our beds
To my mother screaming when the sirens sounded
To her ripping my sister and I from our quilts
And tearing our shoes from the floor in a frenzied flight
to the basement - she reasoned those rubber soles
would protect us, if the glass broke.
These were true treats for our dramatic toddler hearts:
The whole family, gathering in the power-outage dark
In a room filled with the modpodge scent of every candle in the house
To listen to a weather radio and to feed off the fear
That my mother secreted. I would smile and say I was scared
And listen to the rain beat like a drum against the heart
And the thunder that I suddenly took such pride in reminding my mom
She said was just angel's bowling balls hitting the floor
And the lightning she called their pins striking.
And my father would shake his head, and wonder
Why all this for an F1
When I was older, my mother would stay inside
But my father and sister and I would play baseball in the backyard while
we watched the sky go green
--- F4 ---
My mother tried to kill herself in the wake of me.
I did not know this until I was 18,
When my father told me the story of how he had found Her
crying in a locked car in a closed garage steaming with exhaustion.
Postpartum depression, he called it.
Apparent cause: me.
Here, being born is nearly enough
to take life and, like a gooseberry in wanting
hands, crush it
In retrospect, there were signs I should have noticed
warnings of my mother's silent past that would have subdued its surprise
Like: she wore an Eeyore sweatshirt when baking cookies
Like: she was religiously adamant that her favorite color was yellow.
Like: she had her tubes tied when I was 5
the fear another baby would mean another bleak midwinter,
another helpless May, another melancholic misery bred in Missouri
So she had her tubes tied, and decided instead to lose her mind
Frequently, with relative predictability;
such as anytime there was the slightest risk
To my sister or me. Like:
a nail on the ground,
a stray dog,
a siren's song.
Any of which would send her into a state
of veritable madness marked by salt-tears and
listless floorboard-squaking rocking and
scream cries that preceded her grasping onto our upper arms,
hard, as she pulled us away from supposed danger. She would hold us close to her chest, squeeze us there into a purple safety, until
my father rescued us from suffocation.
Anyways, I have come to the belief that my mother's love
is a casual violence.
It is how she loves the snow
so much that she will stand in it with us
until our toes blister and our lips can't touch
the palms of our hands without burning
on the lukewarm fire
reminiscent of the baths she used to run
which she - with her callous covered hands
ripe from carrying the casseroles she made every time
the moon turned blue – would turn up so hot we'd come out
red as razorbacks
Sometimes I wonder how my mother doesn't burn off
all the snow in the atmosphere of her.
Once my sister talked back,
and my mother grew so angry she screamed
and pushed over the 70-pound la-z-boy
holding my 110-pound sister,
who spilled out on the floor, slender as one of those
fire-bellied salamanders who seem to –
if you've ever seen them –
take the shape of their containers
like water soaking into the carpet.
I know that, in this state
Desolation has always been a destination
but I would prefer not to see it
Once, when I was a toddler,
we went to the lake to feed the geese.
It was spring, and there were tiny ducklings
paddling in the shallows and
clumsily tottering about the beach. I threw bread at them,
and gleefully ran to scoop up the fluffs of yellow that reminded me
of my mother's favorite color.
This is when their mothers descended upon me,
With beating wings and needle-teeth hisses they began
to push me back, further and further up the beach, until I was
hands-and-knees crawling underneath a picnic table.
Where they surrounded me, closing in,
encircling my naivety as they sunk beaks into the fat of my stubby legs and arms.
I cried, desperate and sad and confused and alone. And my mother came,
And scooped me up so hard it scraped the back of my calf to bloody, and
With me in her arms, she stepped oh so delicately
on the goose's foot, and in one deft motion pressed its body to the ground
with her other foot, and slid that foot from its body to its flailing neck
until its head was pinned gasping against the ground,
and I watched with wide eyes and that vague sense you get when
watching something terrible take place,
as she stared at the mother goose,
long,
with some kind of metal in her eyes,
and kissed my head without breaking the gaze,
and then carefully stepped away and led me to the car, to go get ice cream
from the lakeside gas station.
Yes, my mother was devastating.
--- F5 ---
And here is the calamity, the final story
Picture me: stomping around my room, throwing scarves
above my head, and scream-laughing, but
all you hear is silence - fresh snowfall - 0 degrees - with
a stray cat's fresh pawprints stalking all the way up to the streetlight
where it disappeared. Winter here
is the sky telling you you'll never be young again, so
I find myself, when I am cleaning the carpet with my hands,
so as to keep quiet,
Wondering what a woman is, and thinking of Her.
Sometimes, now, I imagine walking alone into
a triangle of four cornfields, a dream unsure
if I'll walk back out. Come breathlessly
into a stubbly soybean field
raptured by lost seagulls
littered with the broken pieces of live oaks
thrown from the deadwoods tornado swirling storm.
And I think about one time,
when my mother and I were speaking to each other as we do,
mostly in moon and sinew,
and I asked her why she loved it here,
and She looked at me, watching, without blinking, staring