My ninety year old mother broke her hip one spring. She is a modest woman, but one day she wanted to show me her scar. Why would she do that? And how could I describe it? How much history should I include - for instance, should I let the reader know she has Alzheimer's? I decided to open with the moment itself:
I'm taking everything off/ she announces, clawing at her clothes/ The verbs point to her loosened inhibitions and the quality of her thinking. This is no stripper. There is no playfulness in her act. Moving to a description (a new scar gleams on her mended hip) that is stark and unsparing, the poem finds its identity in this line: Where did this come from, where is it going? I needed to make clear the loss of memory here, the shock that recurs each time a patient is confronted with what she has already grieved over. The reader's attention now focuses on the scar, described with the brusque-sounding "cross-hatched" and its location on the ruins of the body. A cross-hatched seam in the center of a body's landslide. A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing. The reader follows as the old woman touches her scar like a blind person, and when the raised pattern of the scar is likened to "A railroad crossing pocked with stop-signs./A fire escape going down.// the poem demands the reader not flinch from the images of exit. Ninety I'm taking everything off she announces, clawing at her clothes. A new scar gleams on her mended hip. Where did this come from, where is it going? A cross-hatched seam in the center of a body's landslide. A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing. She begins brailing her fingertip down the red raised tracks. It's not what she expected. A railroad crossing pocked with stopsigns. A fire escape going down.
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AuthorCheryl Snell is an award-winning poet and novelist, author of the new family saga Bombay Trilogy, a retelling of her previous novels Shiva's Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha. Archives
October 2020
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