Taps
Here it is again—that poets’ old favorite,
the onion, returning to limp a last time
across the battlefield of one woman’s
page. I regret it, but it is necessary
because no other has what the onion does:
Unassailable structure, despite a thousand
ready methods to its obliteration.
The destruction of layers only preempts
the existence of more. The knife is not
its enemy. Its efforts are too easily
diverted.
And that is how I see her now, untouchable,
the foreign specter of my former mother,
inaccessible as she was to so many years
of me, but undeniable in her form.
You can only
dissect an onion so much before you see
there is nothing to be discovered
that the outermost sphere didn’t reveal.
I start then on this crust. I suppose the
beginning of any of these discussions is her
suicides, collected as casually as ceramic
animals. I can say, My mother laid down
on the train tracks and her fifteen year old
son had to drag her weeping body
unwillingly home.
But that is not a story. Rather, an
archetype that I’m invoking now out
of convenience in the absence of any real
feeling I can muster on the subject,
because I do not have at my opportunistic
writer’s disposal the mind of that fifteen year old,
or even that of his younger sister, and in
the distance between the image and what
I am trying to understand, I see that I am just idly
conjuring wild ideas women get about life
when they decide it is no longer their
friend. I have had
twice as many chances to decide that now,
twice as grown as the eleven year old
whose mother was an alien for entertaining
such ideas. My mother is not an alien,
but just someone else who at times wanted
to beat the world at beating her, and somehow
survived herself long enough to grow
tired of her attempts.
I can even say, without lying to benefit
the poem’s climate, that at times I wanted her
to die. Insistent as she was on inviting death’s
kitsch to our kitchen, its drawers full
of bread-knives, our bathroom full of pills,
her bedroom of X-acto blades, insistent
that ordinary objects become imbued with
enduring threat.
It did not occur to me then to feel pity
for any of us, but it is the simplest of sympathies:
If the woman who bore me wanted anything,
she should have it, and death is not exempt
from the list of feasible desires.
And so she died.
And when I was old enough, so I died, too, and
finally speaking the language that had estranged us
in its commonality for so long, we returned to our
injured onion, and saw he was not alone in the warm
bath of war. We served alongside him, fighting
to preserve our right to as much madness
as we could claim without being labeled
deserters. And the battle ended, and we
joyfully lost, and tearfully surrendered the land
we had staked in the next world for ourselves,
and to commemorate how close we came we
administered last rites to the unalterable
onion, for resembling us much more in permanence
than we knew. And in the fields, a bugle played
over his body.
