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My Mother’s Eye


ISSUE:  Autumn 2002

She kept it in its plastic case beside
her carousel of pills, the single contact
she wore in place of the left lens she lost
to a blown cataract. “I have to put
my eye in,” she’d say, unscrewing the cap,
then would fish with her fingertip to find
that clear horizon submerged in its well,
a bubble she’d balance in the kitchen air.
She always winced inserting it, then clasped
her hands to her face as though it pained her
more than it possibly could. Before bed
it was the same, the ritual reversed,
my father stretched in his plastic-wrapped chair
watching the last of the ten o’clock news.
For twenty years I gauged her slow decline
when I’d come home, able to do nothing,
until with every visit I could trace
the lineaments of a greater distance
in the way she looked, the bride hollowed
from her glowing pose, her going under
a lone swimmer’s turn away from shore.

Impossible to say what hurt her so—
something burgeoning blandly in the pool
of her diminished past, some childhood blame
for a brother’s death, self-placed, or forged
out of her parents’ grief, though chance whispered
the virus into his ear, into his brain?
Or maybe it was the loss of a life
she’d planned without this husband, these sons?
One late night in the kitchen’s haze, her eyes
glazed over, her face wracked with drink, I saw
the unhealed glare of her long resentment:
“I always worked, two jobs when Pop got sick.
I just started college—all incompletes.”

Her fingers squeezed a cigarette’s slow burn.
“I worked nights at Woolworth’s. He got sicker,
and it was pointless. Then I met your father. . . .”
“You could still go back,” I heard myself say,
“Night School.” But she was shaking her head,
flesh starved to bones under her nightgown
as she poured another glass. “My life is over.”
So she thinned, the Sibyl of her own myth,
for years prophesying her imminent end.

And after it was fulfilled, I walked
through the kitchen as my father slept
alone in their bed, still stunned by her stare
that last morning when he woke beside her,
the anti-depressants she refused to take
snug in their bottles on her carousel.
A stubbed-out cigarette, her lipstick printing
its filterless rim, lay in her ashtray.
And there, on the bright floral tablecloth,
her lens-case sat, and inside—her eye
suspended in solution, floating like a cell
in the womb of its familiar waters,
unscathed, dreaming itself, waiting to grow.

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