Lanterns
The summer we placed my mother in the psychiatric hospital,
the July sunlight spray-painted itself as glare along the building’s walls
as we drove away. I peered out the back window while our father
told us that our mother’s thoughts had strayed deep into the woods
and had lost their way, though the doctors had lanterns to help her
find her way back out. Years later, I imagined my mother was a mystic,
that her fever dreams that summer were whispering deeper truths,
that the mechanical thump of her heart was a secret numerology.
She told me once she was grateful for the lights of the nightly stars,
that they were trying to be gardens. And she told me once that
the years were like fingertips brushing lightly across the surface
of some imagined drum, and that naming something was forever
a way of sending it into exile, banishing it to its own separate sphere,
landlocked and lonely. And once—after our father divorced her—
he described how, in his childhood summers in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula, turkey vultures with blood-red heads had circled
above the roadkill as he rode his bike to school, as though
a death watch were a form of sleepy hypnosis. Not one of us, I think,
is fully part of this world but lives inside the body’s ossuary.
We are three parts dreaming and two parts disappointment.
I remember listening to an argument once between my father
and my brother about statutes of limitations over his treatment
of our mother. That was maybe a year before his death,
and our father grew quieter and more patient than usual
while a blur of morning light fell through the windows
and transformed one half of his body into a smudge of photons,
the words pummeling him into something almost incorporeal.
My mother had once claimed she’d been wintering all her life,
and I remembered her standing one January in our backyard,
coatless in the snow, in bare feet, huddling her arms
around her body like a junco motionless on a power line,
gazing toward the bright bruise of sun.
by Doug Ramspeck
from Rattle Magazine
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