Meditation 66

3 June 2020

Eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock. It’s your 94^th today, Allen; it was in her 94^th year that my mother died, who remembered walking the docks of New York, watching war brides come off Liberty ships, noting their farm-girl incongruities with mothers-in-law dressed to the nines, who wandered the corridors of Arden Courts with such purpose until the falls and the pneumonia installed her in a comfy chair in front of a loud television, who'd begun dying nine years ago and kept on dying until the 14^th of June. Someone came to the door and I said, “not now, my mother’s dying.” Her breath came in saccades, and then it stopped. She wasn’t carrying her body but was held by it, and the bones of her thumbs stopped grazing across her narrow hands, every ounce of her energy devoting itself to the end of being. That is my path, a woman said after meditation; the slogan popped into her head. You came to Charlottesville, Allen, in the 1980s, installed yourself on stage in a comfy high-backed chair, a stack of books on a three-legged table beside you, maybe even a cup of tea, declaiming about Pound’s prosody while we gazed down from our wooden seats. Far from Naomi mad on her toilet, or my mother breathing hard on her single bed, far from her home on Lee Jackson Highway near the NRA, the road I never found on the first try. Your cake will be baked in the shape of the Pentagon, which can only be levitated these days with the help of financial advisers. Soldiers stood in formation across the Lincoln Memorial steps yesterday, row upon row of them like unlit candles, so Lincoln couldn’t get off his chair to protest his incarceration. Only the flash of existence, then tear gas rolls down avenues like a mighty stream. 

--Quoted language from "Kaddish"