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Betty Virginia
Great-Grandmother Rhoda’s old upright was kept
in their living room that summer when I first played,
two still-growing hands pulled close together, tentative
on black keys, with hummingbirds behind me
seen through the screen, all come to feed
on whatever mystery was contained in magenta sugar water.
Once a day Grandma Betty would fill their canisters up again,
without ever giving the obvious why: they were pretty
when they bumped gently against her windowsills.
While others remarked on the obvious—her face
recycled in mine—she’d never once claim I was pretty,
not in my giggling, not in my playing the keys,
not even in my big eyes studying her hands
around the embroidery hoop with the soft buzzing soundtrack
behind her. She’d stop her stitching from time to time
to feed the birds, feed me, and regardless of what was left unsaid,
still we were beautiful,
beautifully fed.
Years later—the piano hauled off to God knows where,
the walls stripped of their pictures like slopes razed of their aspen,
bars over the hummingbird windows forcing out
the entire breadth of the San Juans—a sadly iron clad beauty—
and she has stopped stitching, her hands balking at her desires
to just do something,
just do anything, well—
a betrayal worse than when her husband stopped
listening so many years ago, if he ever did listen.
And still she nourishes him and his demands
with sweet crimson water, her own lifeblood dripping
away outside the barred panes, while she long ago stopped
feeding everyone—yes, the best cook I ever have known
has slowly starved away the discipline of feeding herself,
while even the hummingbirds, her last grandchildren, are finally gone—
“too much work”—cared for by neighbors who would feed her, too
like a homeless bird with fractured wings, they’d give her sweet water,
but she would never let them.
Sitting on a stranger’s empty porch
under the hanging purple flowers, below the silent watch
of a trusted friend, I felt memory’s salty-sweet water—
the Dolores River, River of Pains—draw me back
to the mother of my father, back to the matriarch
and her needlepoint, where all has come unraveled.
I heard my heart buzzing, whirring around my head
like a hornet strident and stinging, but dared to look up
and saw instead
an iridescent hummingbird.
September 2005 |
