Kathy Nelson: “Easter Sunday, 1956”
EASTER SUNDAY, 1956
Everything we desire is somewhere else.
—Charles Wright
The magnolia blossoms in the wallpaper behind the sofa,
her straw cloche scattered with lilacs—I begin to imagine
my mother as divine queen of spring, fertility, flowers.
She tilts her head toward me, smiling, my hem draped
across her open fingers, gesture of serene forbearance,
not restraining but keeping me in the camera frame
for Daddy, who has made me laugh. My face shines
in the flash. Stiff organza, netted rosebud headband.
This morning, in the spring of her life, she is happy,
the earth is fecund, florescent.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxUnderstand, Reader
I’m inventing, & invention can be a grave mistake.
Am I wrong to think of my mother as a goddess? Maybe
her smile is a performance for the camera, for my father.
Maybe for her, love is a contest and she is doomed
to second place. Is her open hand poised to punish?
Reader, I want you to think of me as a loving daughter.
But that desire has its own dangers & maybe you know them.
Once, in a dream’s clarity, I awoke from numb forgetting,
remembered with sharp and consuming longing a daughter,
my own, lost in a dark world. Essential part of me, how
would I find her? On the horizon, lights shone like beacons,
but I stumbled in a canyon of talus slopes and boulders.
Had I ever felt so alive as then, throttled by that grief?
I never had the dream again & it’s just as well.
A person could be destroyed by such hopeless desire.
After the click of the camera, my mother lets go
my hem, lets her hand fall to her thigh. It’s mid-morning,
east Texas. She opens her compact to check her lipstick,
closes it like a door. She turns inward then, gazes
at some blooming garden, some impossible paradise.
Kathy Nelson, is a 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize (Five Points, A Journal of Literature and Art). In addition to her two chapbooks, Cattails and Whose Names Have Slipped Away, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cortland Review, LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Twelve Mile Journal, and elsewhere.