Songs from By Heart

Songs from By Heart

On poems by Karen McKinnon

Texts by Karen McKinnon

“To Each Her Own”

Mother clipped two branches—bare sticks, really from woods along the Rio Grande. Tamarisk with eventual feathery rose blossoms, Russian Olive with its silver-green leaves blooming with yellow stars in June. She dug two holes beyond the caliche clay in our front yard and inserted the sticks in the ground. In the spring they both bloomed. Bloomed only for her and her green thumb. In time they grew into massive ten-foot trees. Her rose bushes always survived the winter and she knew just when to prune them so that they arose with Peace, cream colored with sighs of rose on each soft petal. Their thorns never pricked her fingers, not my mother, the Queen of Gardens. Now fifty-five years later the little evergreen tree she dug up from my family’s land in the mountains towers above the house. For my sister’s and my weddings, she wove her ivy into circlets for our bridesmaids’ hair and, naturally, made our bouquets from flowers in her yard. Freesias and Alstroemerias, “Pinks” with their cinnamon scent and her Peace roses. No one would ever dream of planting holly tree in the high desert of Albuquerque, but she did, and they thrived with their Christmas gifts of red berry clusters among their serrated leaves. “Gardening is my yoga,” she used to say. My daughter-in-law gave me three different orchid plants for two birthdays and Mother’s Day once. They did not survive. Too much water or not enough? Too little light or too much? “Oh but you have a gift of words,” my mother consoled me as we picnicked in the yard. “Look up,” she said, “and say what you see.” “The cumulus clouds of summer drifting over a river of words, muddy with life,” I answer. ●

“Moving My Mother”

She used to say, “There’s no rest for the living,” and she was right. She left me in the dwelling of her age with a labor like Psyche’s sifting through the residue of shelf on shelf of every jar she ever washed and dried and kept to feed me with her canned preserves, her saved seeds of marigold, wisteria, hollyhock. I thought it was done, this sorting, wrapping, packing dispensation of my mother’s house, these boxes of buttons, hooks and pins for holding scraps of goods together, keys to lost luggage, deeds and warranties, promissory notes to fix and clean, lists of stacks in storage, all the saved folded sacks and bags stashed in plastic waiting for the future. I can’t bring her back from the underworld where she lives with the demon of dementia. She’s a kept woman now, her mind the missing pieces of luggage, her heart preserved to beat on and on, as day after day in the Alzheimer’s wing she is dressed, fed and turned to no purpose under the sun. Night after night I dream and dream of sorting through enough stuff to find a container big enough to fit the savings of a life she left in my possession. I try one lid after another. I wish I could cover, fold, close it up for good. Last night in my dream she reached out, scattered seeds all over me. ●