Incandescence
My Mother's Light
Incandescence
.
On the bridge crossing the interstate
the sunset paints the black chainlink fence
golden. Peter, Paul, and Mary are singing
in my mom’s voice. The dawn is breaking,
it’s early morn. Her smile over me when I was little,
blonde hair hazy in bedroom light through
half-closed eyes, her hand soft on my shoulder.
We’re cleaning out the basement in my parents’ house,
making trips in my husband’s truck to a storage unit
and my dad’s new condo—the house is too big without her.
Brad walks ahead of me through the sharp angled hallways
of CubeSmart Storage, surveillance cameras leering above
shiny corrugated metal walls. We push carts piled
with camp chairs and cots, sleeping bags still in the silky
drawstring covers my mom slipped them into years before.
We carry green Coleman lanterns in our free hands—
one each—protecting the glass.
“This feels like a poem you’ve already written,” Brad says
over his shoulder. My mom’s camping supplies, her blue
plastic tote with coffee filters, and mini individually-wrapped
toilet paper rolls for the campground bathroom. Every place
I go I think of you, every song I sing I sing for you.
When I was little, we hung these lanterns on the posts
above picnic tables in Red River Gorge where Brad and I
got married last year. The propane burned hot all night,
heating the ceramic mesh mantels in the lamps’ glass globes:
light by incandescence. Oh babe, I hate to go.
My mom isn’t in our wedding photos, but I feel her
smile in every one, bright as lantern light.
This piece was recently published in a special issue of Many Nice Donkeys.
This week, Brad painted with some friends at St. Francis Seraph Church in the Over-the-Rhine region of Cincinnati. The church, built in 1859, is sadly set to be sold to a development company. The sun through the stained glass, and the light caught in the heavy drapery reminded me of this poem about the lanterns we used to take camping when I was child. I didn’t originally link the image at the start of the poem—the sun in the chainlink fence—with the glowing ceramic mesh mantels that give off light, but now I see them as mirrors, both reflecting the warm glow of my mom’s love.
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Plein Air Poetry Postcards!
Our desire to more deeply ground our work in the physical world led us to launch Plein Air Poetry Postcards for our paid subscribers! April’s postcards are already on their way, but you can sign up to get some art mail starting in May! :)
What We’ve Been Up To Lately
We’re continuing our goal of memorizing a poem every month this year! For May, we’ve chosen the poem “To This May” by W.S. Merwin. We hope you’ll join us! :)
We moved our shop from buymeacoffee.com over to our website! This should streamline things for us and give us more flexibility with our offerings in the long-run. We’re still cleaning things up and changing links in our previous posts, but if you spend some time perusing on the shop, we’d welcome any feedback you have!
Oh my😭