Silver Birch Press published this poem today in their “Mothers” series. My thanks to Melanie, the Silver Birch Editor.
Thirteen Ways of LookIng at My Mother-in-Law
After Wallace Stevens
An Arkansas farm woman, Boby loves
Sunday drives after church to see what folks
are planting and to tidy up the family graves.
In spring, when the fields are ripe
with fresh manure, Boby takes a deep breath.
“Smells like money,” she says.
Honesty is her virtue. She told me once
“You’re not exactly what we hoped for.”
Boby has no use for corsages. “Give me
something I can put in the ground.“
She has eight flowerbeds—
lilies, gardenias, azaleas, roses.
Each granddaughter and great-grand
has a quilt pieced from a lifetime of scraps—
prints, plaids, ginghams and a bit of lace.
“They look pretty good from the road,” she says.
Her mother lived on the next farm over,
her uncles just beyond, ripples of family
for a thousand acres, bickering, loving,
gossiping, mourning.
Boby buried two husbands. The first was hers
for a quarter century. The second just four years,
“a bonus” she said after forty years a widow.
We spend fall weekends shelling wash tubs
of pecans—300 pounds some years—our fingers
raw and stained dark as the delta loam.
Always a stray underfoot—cat or mongrel dog.
They show up on her doorstep. She shrugs
and takes them in. The cats are all called Katie.
She played piano at church as the congregation
dwindled to a half-dozen stooped, gray forms.
She never cared much for the preacher.
When she turned 90, Boby announced she’d give up driving
October first. Took us awhile to figure out her birthday
was the 6th, and she knew she’d flunk the eye test.
She killed a rabid skunk in a neighbor’s driveway
with the shotgun she keeps under the bed.
“Sorry I can’t stay to visit,” she told her friend.
“I’ve got a cake in the oven.”
Now 96, she lives alone, as bent, stubborn and fragile
as wisteria, children scattered from acreage bought
a century ago. No money in farming these days.
“They’ll carry me away from here in a pine box,” she says.
First published in Third Wednesday Poetry Journal.
Sarah Russell Poetry 