Nobody Treats You Like a Mother When Your Mother is Dead

Nobody Treats You Like a Mother When Your Mother is Dead Eric Pankey (bio) Seven or eight blossomsOn the little apple tree.Barely a pie in the offing. Only yesterday, my mother was a fifth grader bareback upon a donkey in Arkansas. Her house has a coal chute and a laundry chute: gravity the technology of the day. If she leans too far to pick a buttercup, she might fall off the donkey. The name of the donkey? Whatever she calls it, it responds. Already in spring, she thinks of autumn. There's the memory of the sound of sparrow wings in a hedge. Water in the creek working around rocks. Her father, his right eye a little clouded, dimmer than the left, is a widower. A widower in a town of widows. He will not remarry. She calls him Floyd, which is his given name. The past, unlike the future, is surround by a narrow margin of silence. The future is accompanied as always with sparse, plaintive music, as if to announce something is about to happen. The something unclear until it happens. A little dust whirls up, then disappears like a bit of advice from a soothsayer. Lux. Lumina. Wavelengths are absorbed or reflected. A thunderstorm interrupts the afternoon. Late summer, her garden thrives, begun with bargained-for cuttings from this widow or that. She likes the shadows cast by the lace curtains onto the pale of the pine kitchen floor. Someday, she thinks, I'll write it all down—not to remember, but so as not to forget. End Page 148 Eric Pankey Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry. A collection of prose poems, The History of the Siege, is forthcoming in 2024 from Codhill Press. A collection of poems, Vanishments, is forthcoming in 2024 from Slant Books. Copyright © 2024 Pleiades and Pleiades Press