The Unbearable Realism of Surrealism

My mother died eight years [now 18 years] ago. I'm still burying her. I'm still digging us up, sifting her ashes, out of reach, for a wisp, for a wasp even, of sustenance.

I still rage that the last thing she took into her body was yet another vodka martini, one of an infinity of martinis over 30-40 years, the last thing her body needed. Her liver -- had I not known her as a liver, a woman alive in the home, in company, in the camps we set up in Wisconsin, in Canada, in Alaska? -- quit. I still rage at the lack of answer to a question I still rage at: Had she quit?

I found her tonight in this prose poem by Ray Gonzalez, "Black Winged Butterfly With Blue Body" (Human Crying Daisies, Red Hen Press, 2003):

In the sleep of disappearance, it hovered over the leaf as if I had been here before to hold out my hand and scare it away. In the stone tower across the lake, piano music invaded the death masks and turned them into disguises for the living who held their tongues over the water so the dragonfly could float there and touch them for an instant, the moment each person who survived the touching knew what the hurt was about. In the lake where it emerged, I saw the dragonfly one last time and waited for a day, weeks from now, when I could walk away without seeing my mother binding her hair to the lowest fern growing out of the the water.

 

4-5-2006

Comments

[jessica]

craig, i understand how you feel. alcoholism is awful. but self-destructive behaviors like that are usually brought about by something more awful. but it's horrible to feel like you can't stop someone from acting like that. this is a small hug. you can delete it if it makes you uncomfortable.

[David E. Patton]

This is some good writing. I really like your work. It opens the eyes to a new way of thinking. You are a master of words.