Not Complete Enough
How my Mother’s embroidered apron unfolds in my life
—Arshile Gorky
As I put out my cigarette tonight in bed
I thought of my mother,
how she would lie
in the dark
her bed and as a boy I wd
open
the open and see the red spot in her hands.
I thought of my mother tonight
when I put out my cigarette
in the dark bed,
stomping it out
and her in
how I would open the door at night
and see the red thing in her hands,
and now a man
I have the red thing
and it is the last thing
I do.
The last thought that
the house is clean,
was her thought mine
tonight in her home,
red thought
the two of us in the dark,
thoughts of the day,
the clock right, the window open,
how many lunches made,
my life so apart
And yet in her hands.
How I lie in her hand
and her head turns
its circle, over the day
in my head.
Tonight after midnight
my mother and the gesture
I make with my last
cigarette her gesture,
how I wd help her upstairs
when she got drunk on holidays
in terror help her
and always she’d ask for the
last cigarette and fall asleep
with it and I wd handle
the details,
two pillows, window open, and the door
a crack so we could hear
her if she fell out
of bed.
And she did and another cigarette
with her gray hair knotted on the pillow
when I lit it
From Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners, edited by Joshua Beckman, CAConrad, and Robert Dewhurst © 2015 John Wieners Literary Trust, Raymond Foye, Administrator. Reprinted with the permission of The John Wieners Literary Trust.
John Wieners
John Wieners lived on the periphery of several movements during his lifetime—the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance—and was granted cult status in the poetry community.