Prosepoems for Old Women

Prose Poems for Old Women

May Stevens

SITTING STILL

Some people died who never died before she said
They died iust now she said readine The Times
Her skin was pink her flesh concealed the bones
inside She pretended she was a chair
hoping death would flash past sat still as a sofa
A dress laid over two shoes neatly placed.

WOMAN WAITING

My mother sits at a window watching the field.
When I come after six months, a vear, she waves.
Moving from chair to bed to table she opens the
door to the field, waits to receive words of praise
and affection. The days of no figure crossing the
field have moved to this moment. We are together.
We drive off. She has nothing to say. She is humming.

ALICE DICK b. NEW BRUNSWICK. CANADA 1895

As children in Chatham Alice and her sister Mary
went for picnics on a boat down the River Miramichi
as far as Bav de Vin and Burnt Church where the boat
turned around. They caried sandwiches and lemon
meringue pie homemade by Nelle Morn who hooked
five or six rugs a vear, took in laundry, baked
and sold fresh bread in herstore, made all the
familv s clothes and delivered milk to her neishbors.
Three of her four children were girls but they never
learned to do allthe things their mother did. She
had no time to teach them.
Alice was in the second grade when Nellie Morn threw
a log from the top of the woodpile into Alice's left
eye. Her blue dress turned red.
Alice was twelve when her father died. She went to work
as mothers helper for the Snowballs and the Steeds
who lived in the big house on the hill. Thev owned the
pulp mill.
Later she came to Boston, got a job in a Chinese
restaurant where she waited on True N. Stevens half-
owner of Stevens and Greene Groceries and his boy Ralph
who flirted with her. Asked what A.D. on the bill stood
for she said after dinner. They got married. She was
twenty-four. I was the first of their two children
the one who lived.
She is nearly eighty now. She has a pink-gummed smile
incredibly innocent and sweet without the least inflec-
tion of twenty vears confinement in the back wards of
state mental hospitals. The light in the one eye that
sees has never gone out.

OLD WOMAN BATHING

Loosened strands slip down deep divided back.
Buttocks shelfslides to creasing thighs. Knees
keep a partial crouch. Belly slings body center
forward over a hairless pouch. She lifts each breast
soaping the smell of age. She (matter self-propelled
mushrooms pink and lavender, lustful, greedy, feeding)
steps into air, hands stroking space, trusting someone
is there to towel her drv, pin remnant hair, give back
her name, her watch, her storv. She loves being clean
but who has time to wash her every day? Is she a baby
with a future? She loves hair dresed but fears over
handling may make it thin. Dampish stil, flushed,
talced, her body blooming, she swings foot, hums
nightgowned beside the bed, waits for milk and pills.
Glasses folded under pillow, sheet clutched high,
one hand slipped between her thighs, she sleeps a
sleep she will denv, in tongues converses with
familiars, unshareable. No she did not speak she lies
keeping her secret garden, loving the long continuous
dialog, absorbing, obsessing, warm and sweet as ex-
crement newly made, unspeakable, but hers, and real.

ADDIE, ALICE

Aunt Addie went to the hospital for a three day checkup
came out with a clean billof health rejoiced at eighty-three
ay-yah she savs Maine voice unaided eyes family proud race proud
discipline proud straight square proud spareness dryness proud
awkward proud truth proud. Addie; You start out with nothing
you end up with nothing. My traveling days are over. I
remember Souza's band and Burton Holmes' lectures. In fact I
heard Winston Churchill telling his experiences in the Boer War
the winter of nineteen hundred and one. Making blouses for
April pajamas for Ramona distant granddaughters putting up
pears for the winter of nineteen hundred and seventy-two. Aunt
Addie s house is bare of suffering as her face in which suffering
would be an indulgence eves no feling showing asking Maine
voice slightly rasped edges knowing but not dwelling what did
you expect?
In Istanbul a woman of one hundred and one is lifted out of bed
into bed mind clear in a crooked cage telling how the sultan
was deposed and another came in the palace.
Mary had a sister Alice pleasingly plump white calves
hairless armpits clear brow still eyes. Alice lost an eye
when wood was thrown from the woodpile. Blood ran down her
dress. Alice lost a son flu caried him off. Alice lost
a daughter who married a Jewish artist. Alice lost a husband
when she grew fat and mad. Twenty years after one-eyed
burnt-out schizophrenic Alice sees three figures swarm through
glass doors daughter husband her husband? son her son? to
take her outside. She smiles says well declare gets up
goes to the door where coat hat bag are hanging and turns
ready.