from The Modie Box, i.m. Bernadine Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

from The Modie Box

I do not understand how I can be alive while you are dead. The field white with snow and the absence of crops. Closer, the creamy brown clumps of stalks, the world after harvest.

*

They offered you to us as a possible vegetable. A butternut squash, perhaps, its pale warmth.

*

I took a box file and put everything I had of us into it—letters I wrote you, cards you sent me, photos and postcards. I stuck on a label. Its presence on the shelf reassures me.

*

Burnt toffee peanuts, salt water taffy, lightly sweet white wine, Constant Comment tea, raisin bread toast, orange roughy, salmon, Polish sausage, black olive pizza.

*

Death, resurrection, death. What could be more violent?

*

The line crackled, but I could still hear pain in your voice, if not each precise word. I fought myself not to call back, to find a clear channel, to extend or intensify your difficulty. If I’d known it’d be the last, I would have succumbed to my selfishness. Without such knowledge, I nearly had, anyway. I tried to allay my guilt for not calling back but wanting to by going online for flowers at once.

*

This hunger unappeasable.

*

There is no redemption here. Sometimes I pick up the box and shake it, and that absence, its dry sound, drags me to weeping.

*

Hazel eyes: sunlit wheat

*

The florist could say when the flowers had been left at the hospital, but not if—

*

I begin to suppose I will never stop writing this poem so I, agnostic, dubious of heaven, may keep talking to you.

*

Your body soft with loose flesh, your embrace a leaning into ease.

*

I wrote my first poem outside of class at age 11. We were camping in Indiana, and I’d gone to the lake with my journal while you and Dad set up the Steury. As soon as I finished the first draft, I dashed back to the site to show it to you.

*

When you laughed hard or long, you wiped the corners of your eyes.

*

A lock of hair from youth: black-brown. A lock of hair from age: hazel, glimmering honey brown, dye from a box.

*

Marigolds and mums, the only flowers she dared plant, they needed so little care. 

---

This piece originally appeared in Shearsman. 

 

A commemorative bench for my parents on the Constitution Trail, Normal, Illinois

As readers of this blog will know, until his paralysis in 2007, my father loved cycling, and the creation of the Constitution Trail in Bloomington-Normal was a great event for him. He cycled on it regularly and indeed, talkative man that he was, he also made friends there. After his death in 2009, I talked with my mother about arranging for a commemorative bench on the trail, an idea that really pleased her. When she died in 2011, I wanted to include her, too, somehow. The bench is located in Fairview Park. (If you click on the photo, it should enlarge.)

I look forward to visiting the bench when I'm next in town, probably early September.

i.m. Bernadine Marie Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

My nephew, Brandon Etter, and my mother in July 2001

Mothering Sunday (UK)

Christmas 2010. Experience and Innocence. My mother, above, had lost her husband in March 2009 and was persisting sadly and hopefully. My niece Sara, below, is now ten and as easy and happy as she was then. 

In England, it's Mothering Sunday, reduced to 23 hours by the time change. I'm a little grateful for the shortening. I'm reckoning what I'd trade to have my mother back again for an hour, a week, a month, a year. Make me an offer....   
 

i.m. Bernadine Marie Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

my mother with her grandson Brandon Etter and granddaughter Sara Cummings

You are daily, horribly missed.

My adoption birthday comes round again

I was adopted two weeks after my birthday, on this date, oh so many years ago. Here I am, in the middle, oblivious to the two happy people who'd come to get me. If not in town, I always called home on this day; as I became older, the date seemed more important than my natal birthday. 

This is my second year without them, my father having died in 2009 and my mother in 2011. Last night I dreamed we (my family of childhood) were traveling by car and picking up some things along the way. At one place we stopped I found loads of keepsakes: old photographs, school yearbooks, letters, drawings, etc., but there was only so much space in the car and only so much time to go through them, which was making me increasingly anxious and upset. That's when I woke and realized the dream was close to reality, as one of my brothers-in-law threw out boxes of who knows what and a great chunk of what was saved was destroyed in a fire.

I can hardly explain how fortunate I was to be adopted by these two people, who were consistently loving, proud, and supportive of me and my endeavors. I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

 

Sunflowers is out!

Sylph Editions' Nobile Folio of Peter Coker's painting, "Sunflowers," is out, with my series of prose poems, "Meditations." The series intermingles responses to Coker's painting with thoughts on my late mother and flowers; the piece as a whole is dedicated to her memory. You can learn more about the folio on Sylph Editions' website here.

Ten Months Gone

A dozen conversations, a baby burbling, an espresso machine's screech. Amid these a palpable silence, where once my consciousness chattered to yours.

In my hands I clasp the silence, turn it over: made of clay, yet throwing, hurling won't shatter it. Hardened, fired at a terrific heat. Months till it cooled enough to handle or, rather, till its touch didn't scald and briefly efface my fingerprints.

What if I had held it, while hot, to my face? Some days still I wish I had done it, wish everyone could see the scar of your loss. 

My Adoption Birthday

This is a picture of me with my parents, Henry and Bernadine Etter, the day I was adopted, exactly two weeks after I was born. We always referred to today as my adoption birthday.

This adoption birthday is my first without them, without their unconditional, boundless love, and I miss them desperately.

Six months gone

Click to see this picture enlarged and the wonderful expressions on their faces better.

My niece Ella White (formerly Katelyn Etter) with my mother, Bernie.

The shirt's she wearing is one of the ones I kept.

He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

O Christmas Tree

Tonight, decorating my boyfriend's shiny fake brown tree, strung with bunny lights, I broke for a moment. (Is that oxymoronic--can one really break for just a moment; is it then not a real break?) I was hanging ornaments, and for many years I bought matching ornaments for my mother and I, to create a mirroring between home and away. I couldn't remember the origins of some, while others' purchases I recalled vividly, as with those from the Mikasa outlet in Irvine; the strangeness of buying crystal snowflakes in a desert.

In my ten years in England, I think I've seen candy canes just once, and so finding them today amid online grocery shopping startled and delighted me. On Christmas Day candy canes would appear on the tree, as though left by Santa; there were several late nights I put those candy canes up for the sake of my younger sisters and later my nieces and nephews. Now I'm eager to repeat the same, as I cling to that sharply severed thread to the past.

Often in my thoughts are my parents' histories, which they referred to in asides and the odd anecdote over the years. Both were only children. After my father died, my mother intended to write down what she knew of her family's history, once she retired; she died days before the first retirement check arrived. I scramble at what I remember, knowing how much information my parents held dear that died with them. There is so much information, and still so much lost.

From here I see a rare photograph of my father smiling after his paralysis. He's got a Christmas present in his lap. One brother in law, two nephews, and my mother are scattered and intent on their own purposes in the background, and for once Dad looks at ease in the ill-fitted wheelchair. I had a tremendously nourishing family life, I knew and appreciated the fact, and oh, life seems so meager without it.

Four Months

I'm still waiting for you to come back. Almost every day I think of calling to talk, to put this horrible nonsense behind us and tell you all about the new cats, the teaching, poetry and ask after your cats, your teaching, what you're reading. Before I pick up the phone, though, I admit, rationally, you're gone, and then the ache, the deep-chest ache, and the longing to return to the moment of denial, the moment you were almost still here.

Three months gone

Living in a world where you are not is unbearable.

Henry Etter and Bernadine Meeker, 1965

The year before they married