Tending
For Dad

Mom gave me paper dolls to mother
before she left to tend to Grandpa. So much to do
in the new house - the carpet
still a roll on the hardwood floor - but Daddy would wait
for Mom to return from laying her father to rest
before laying it wall to wall.
There was a garden to uncover first, rocks
to rake before seeds could be planted - beans,
carrots, lettuce, squash and radishes. I hated
the rock picking and weeds; later, snapping beans
into a bowl, I wondered why he fussed
over poles and vines only to give so much
of his reward away. "Seeds in the ground
multiply like rabbits," he'd say,
"we'll have plenty," and handed me a packet
to plant in neat rows. Forty springs

and twenty of my own gardens later
I drove by the house. Dad's bed was gone,
the space now patched with grass.
Easier to mow than defend young
bean plants against rabbits or children
who would velcro leaves to their t-shirts
and shorts, pretending they were the beanstalk
Jack climbed. The siding begged for a coat
of paint. I almost stopped and offered
to do the job for free.

August 2005

* * * * *

Called
For Mom

There are more photos of the faces
of Calcutta and Mumbai framed
on our wall than of any other place
they have traveled, more faces than temples
or monkeys, railstations or the Taj Mahal,
to take down and divide between the three of us.

As I sit and watch her shallow-breathing,
bare sighs the nurses know will never sink
in deeper, I cannot see what her eyes follow
in her death sleep. Now, her Pop walks
her down the aisle with reservations.
Now, this man, instead of the continent
that had called her long ago, claims
his little girl. Now, she nurses children
of her choosing. Now, she hangs
all the faces on her wall and looks back.
Now, I cannot hear Him say to her,
Main tumhein kabhei nahin chodenge. *

* I will never leave you.

April 2007

* * * * *

Hardpan
For Mom and Dad

At the new house she wanted a Better Homes & Garden
yard like the picture she'd clipped from the magazine,
three birches on the north corner, ringed with tulips.
Dad told her they wouldn't grow there, the soil was packed
clay, but she'd set her face, so he relented. So did the ground
as she picked-axed the hole herself. She planted the saplings,
their leaves already autumn gold, and clustered bulbs
to package depth. She waited as winter rains
rivered over her perc-failed Eden for the spring
ideal in the picture tacked up in the pantry, waited

while we girls bloomed one after the other and grew taller
than the birches as she replaced clay-choked bulbs
for a decade of falls. Dad threatened every summer
to cut them down as he did the alders that clogged the ditch, tired
of mowing around them. Mom pled no, and kept replanting
the tulips, having faith they'd eventually flourish. Forty years
on, as the asbestos turned Dad's lungs to hardpan,
he finally softened, rewooed Mom. The tulips
never filled a vase, but the birch trees by then topped
out at fifty feet, their roots having reached down deep
enough to find sure water.

April 2006