Martha Deed

3

Her stroke in '94* and mine in 2003

Is our blood still ours if it's escaped

our arteries but not our skulls

and direction, sound, and color scramble

where is the line between dementia

and creativity and how much worry

to the question depending on our age

playful with words at 50

or disinhibited at when

the woodpecker nods its beak

against the tree in front of me

the rapping enters from the rear

if we notice we cannot unravel

the riddle of a conceit does it mean

we will write in concrete now

*Well, I figured I was going to die because my father died when he was 49 and it runs in his family, what he died from, cerebral hemorrhages. (Interviewed by Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Foundation.)

Bernadette Mayer's first stroke occurred when she was 49 years old.

11

So here's the thing: If you grow up with mountains at your back ‒

even old worn-out mountains ‒ South Mountain and Hook Mountain ‒

just north of the Palisades in Nyack, New York ‒ you grow up

with geographic myopia: the sun sets in Nyack an hour before it

sets in Blauvelt or Nanuet and if you are a kid expected

to be home before dark, those hills (mountains) can ruin your life,

and if you live near the river, while you can see less than a quarter-mile

West, you can see miles across the river and up the river to Ossining

and look out of your attic window and you can see Sing Sing

and the Death House with two boys' your age Mother and Father

there and you can sit at the top of your stairs and stare out the window

on the day those boys' parents ‒ both of them ‒ were killed by democracy

and you can wonder how come this happened to a Mother and a Father

and why even your own mother and father won't explain it to you

beyond saying they did something wrong, but then again, you know

your own parents make bad decisions every day about meals and snacks

and allowances and bedtimes, but no one has killed them, which is OK,

and probably the boys now orphaned should not have been punished

by the loss of their parents either, all of which you remember 50 years

later when you climb those stairs to look out of that window for the last time

and you remember that day of executions and when you look out

of that window you see there is no view of Sing Sing or of the Death

House or of Ossining, but only of Tarrytown where

there used to be a Chevy plant and a ferry that took you there

which is to say it is true that the hills block the sun as they

always did and the river is open to seeing for miles

but neither the seeing or the not seeing explains what a child sees.

16

Does the old woman know she is in the Winter of her days?

the shortest day the eternal night soon to come?

and the lusty pine, sturdy, 100 feet tall against the seasons

the pine that has weathered ice and wind and snow

sheltered birds and squirrels and bugs and bark

has held on even to its cones

does it know which storm will cause fracture

the falling down of branches so heavy

the old woman will leave them

a dying, fading wreath around the trunk

until they are dull and dry in Spring?

If the woman knows she does not say

the signs and probabilities inform groups, she thinks

not individuals ‒ and certainly not trees

(c) Martha Deed

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