Tag: Ancestry

mausoleum chambers

fill my mother’s house

the lavender room

with grandmother luvenia’s bed

and soft pink crystal light fixture from the old house on fishing creek

is where the spaw and bates families are entombed

the bed spread woven from funeral ribbons and loss

cherry framed antique portraiture

hang as illuminated death masks of my ancestors

behind the old convex glass

shoe leather faces

whip stitched lines

and battle scars

their backs curved

from bending to god’s will

their great depression was their existence

i look into the women’s changed eyes

who lost children

they had faded to a barely living shade of gray

known only to battlefields

and beds sickened with scarlet fever

country life is a sort more merciless than most

particularly to the feminine persuasion

mother swears the cicadas were screaming in the june apple trees

that pot steam august day meant for sewing bicentennial dresses

the day aunt lena jumped in the well

i often walked by the sealed haunted thing as a little girl

lungs filling with fear

wondering why that day

she chose to turn potable water into tears

was it the four year old daughter

named venus

born and died in the month of april

buried beside the church

had the clocks her late husband made wound her tightly enough to do it

or was it simply senility

i’ll never know

when had she stopped hearing the piano music

what had she suffered

that an abyss seemed somehow more comforting

than another day lost in the valley of stones

i close the memory of her with a crystal doorknob

cousin leland went into the well after the body

but her soul

never resurfaced