Grandmother Nose Poem
I enter the room where she waits for love and is always surprised, exclaiming, “You’ve gained weight!” or “You’ve lost weight!” Timeless accusations of change. Later, she mourns: “Your hair! It used to look so nice when you had it short. Nice and neat like a little bird. Oh! you have such a little face for all that hair.” Still later, in a half whisper (this is a forbidden topic, she knows, but irresistible), “Do you want a nose job? If it’s the money don’t worry, honey, I’ll take care of it. See how we could make it straight and slender, just take out the hook, the bump, here?” And her fingers, dry as aristocrats, trace on my stubborn, resisting peasant’s face the outlines of a potential perfect nose. A beautiful nose, a safe nose, a sort of Julie Andrews crossing the Alps (in short hair) while the sun shines and the orchestra swells heroic and happy violins kind of nose. I heard a poet once exhort her sister writers to mention all things under the sun at least once, and praise them: the phosphorescent green-black back of the dung beetle, or the broken bottle scattered in diamonds on the pavement; the elephant, the eagle. My grandmother has made complaint her art form, and everything she loves she coats with a protective glaze of pain and doubt to mark it: This is special — let no one touch, no gods or angels of death defile. This one’s mine. My nostril is like the long arched shoulder of a seagull about to take wing, veering off to the left. It would look good with a tiny emerald nestled in its delta; nag me one more time about this nose job idea of yours, and I’ll do it. I’ll pierce my nose. Shall I celebrate how it goes with my high slightly flat Slavic cheekbones? My eyebrows are unruly, grow a bridge (too far) across my — there’s that nose again! My eyes are owlish, round. A couple of people claim to have drowned in them, but we all survived. This whole face is my gift, this round, quizzical, and flyaway face, attached to earth by way of pendulous breasts, long waist, hips like sloping hills; all verboten in my grandmother’s eyes. But what can I do? I have another grandmother, eons older, she of the scales and feathers, she of the fur; goddess of hoof, horn, beak, and claw, gnarled and riven, wiser than fashion by far. She decreed my beauty hers long ago and even condemned me to praise it endlessly. I stand on my nose.
Invisible Work
Because no one could ever praise me enough, because I don’t mean only these poems but the unseen unbelievable effort it takes to live the life that goes on between them, I think all the time about invisible work, about the single mother on welfare I talked to years ago, who said, “It’s hard. You bring him to the park, run rings around yourself keeping him safe, cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner, and there’s no one to say what a good job you’re doing, how you were patient and loving for the ten thousandth time, even though you had a headache.” And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself because I am lonely when all the while, as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried by great winds across the sky, think of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night, the slow, unglamorous work of healing, the way worms in the garden tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe and bees enter and leave their lovers like exhausted Don Juans while owls and poets stalk shadows, our loneliest labors under the moon. There are mothers for everything, and the sea is a mother too, whispering and whispering to us long after we have stopped listening. I stop and let myself lean a moment against the blue shoulder of the air. The work of my heart is the work of the world’s heart. There is no other art.
