“The Art of Waiting”, “Light in August”, “Yizkor/Remember”, and “Dead Mothers”

By Fran Schumer

 

The Art of Waiting

 

My mother waits, watches

the snow. She’s frail, 94,

paralyzed with Parkinson’s.

Until last year, she swam

walked, cajoled, exhorted,

ate without aides, a whirl of energy,

my father the dreamy one.

 

She didn’t take inactivity well,

nor discomfort nor injustice

though she did accept bad news,

her father dying when she was young.

“I thought I’d never be happy again,”

she said, “but you see, I am.”

 

I learned the art of waiting

at a concert with my husband.

I was not as absorbed by the music

as he was, his hand pressing

my thigh when I fidgeted.

It would be a long night.

I remembered my mother

telling me how she learned to sit

through concerts with my father.

I just started liking them, she said.

You just sit there and wait

 

like she did the other day

watching gusts of new snow

whirl and eddy

from her 31st-floor window

until all you could see

were silvery fields,

the furry shapes of passersby,

ghosts of who they had been.

 

 

 

Light in August

 

On the way to the Vineyard,

light cuts like shards of glass,

white, bright, and blinding.

 

It’s late afternoon.

We turn on Cowdry Road,

board the ferry.

 

How gorgeous this summer

though we are days away

from the longest, lightest —

 

Only one day past the solstice,

my mother would mourn

the waning of the light.

 

How quickly time goes,

how soon she will die,

how short life seems.

 

On other days, how long.

You wake at four in the dark,

a lifetime until there is light.

 

 

 

Yizkor

Remember

 

It’s Yom Kippur, and I’ll break

the fast with Lenny and Mateo, his husband —

— the rules be damned. I’ll eat steak,

they’ll eat crab; we’ll all drink wine.

 

It’s a long time to wait, dinner

at sunset, so late at eight.

No synagogue near, I choose instead

to honor the day, remember the dead.

 

My father died last year.

Our first Yom Kippur without him.

Chabad online says recite

Yizkor, the memorial prayer.

 

I listen instead to Joan Baez sing

Lord Byron’s No More A Roving.

“That beautiful voice,” my father said.

He taught us to listen.

 

I listen to Mary Hamilton and weep,

to Polly Von, the hunter’s dirge,

to Peter, Paul, and Mary lament

the long hours my father worked

 

spraying roaches in tenements.

At night, the music lulled him to sleep.

From deep inside me, finally,

the old chant emerges. I weep the words:

 

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma* 

 

 

*Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world,

which God has created according to God’s will.

 

 

 

Dead Mothers

 

My physical therapist lost her mother at age twelve

My editor lost hers at age ten

A woman in my eating disorder program, at eleven.

Her father was a pilot.

He was never around.

“I became a sex and love addict,” she said.

 

The summer before I went to college

I stopped eating. I lost a pound a day.

I read in a book years later

women too tied to their mothers

develop anorexia for fear of leaving them.

 

At college, I watched the world disappear,

vanish as if in nuclear war.

Everyone I knew was gone.

And yet, every day I spoke to my mother

on a pay phone at the end the hall,

a piney box where they keep prisoners

before they feed them their last meal.

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