A return to an earlier style and, oddly, to writing the draft in
longhand, a practice I'd all but renounced.
IN THE SUMMER OF MY MOTHER'S WIDOWHOOD
Loss compounded loss, even to the clothes.
So one August morning my mother took me
with her to a house on Bronx Park East
to surrender my father's clothes, even the suits
that still smelled of aftershave or cologne,
and the wide ties--this was 1954--that would
return to fashion in the late Sixties
when I almost wished I'd kept them.
Loss was not only loss, it was often surrender.
My mother had been widowed by a man
who took whatever he saw: an unaffordable Hermes tie,
a first wife cast off for my mother cast off for others
that culminated in the woman whose love killed him.
With my mother, not so strangely perhaps,
and though everything else was all about her,
her grieving was reactive.
She'd cry not for herself but for me,
with me, when I cried for the father I'd feared.
She did not drink more than usual, or
go out with men, or do much at all
but skim Readers' Digest and go for walks.
Perhaps she missed the space my father
had taken in her life: even if it was a dark star,
at least it was fixed in the skies.
She'd go for walks with her sister to determine
what to do next, until she settled
on working again for the first time in years,
wearing this time the new identity of Widow,
a faux-mourner for her secret relief at her release,
because purple was her color, and unlike
my father's florid ties, it never was too far from Style.
KTW/5-26-07
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Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
"It takes a big man to cry. It takes a really big man to
laugh at that man."
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