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.
Fran Schumer’s poetry, fiction, or prose has appeared in The New York Times, The North American Review, and other publications. Her Chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022 by Choeofpleirn Press. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied political theory at college but wishes she had spent more time reading Keats.