Jane Mead - World of Made and Unmade

2016 by Jane Mead All rights reserved Printed in the United States 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. Alice James Books 114 Prescott Street Farmington, ME 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mead, Jane, 1958- author. Title: World of made and unmade / Jane Mead. Description: Farmington, ME : Alice James Books, [2016] Identifiers: LCCN 2016011688 (print) | LCCN 2016018430 (ebook) | ISBN 9781938584329 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781938584398 (eBook) Classification: LCC PS3563.E165 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3563.E165 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011688 Alice James Books gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, private foundations, the University of Maine at Farmington, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Cover Art: Our mothers house, Rincon by Parry Mead Murray N OTE TO THE R EADER Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size: Turns out Leo is one lying; This year I have disappeared; The hornets swarm Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author.

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ALSO BY JANE MEAD: Money Money Money | Water Water WaterThe Usable FieldHouse of Poured-Out WatersThe Lord and the General Din of the WorldA Truck Marked Flammable (chapbook) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Heartfelt thanks to Rick Barot and Carolyn Kuebler for their substantial commitment to this poem, the following sections of which appeared in New England Review: The third time my mother fell; Outside the window the trees; In the hills above Rincon; And when there was nothing left; We are lying in the big bed; In animal darkness, before; I bring breakfast, balancing the tray; Turns out Leo is one lying; This year I have disappeared; The hornets swarm in the diesel-filled air.; How will you spend your courage,; From my mothers cabin I hear them; Mexico is a snake eating; When this is all over; My mothers curled up on the big bed; In my dream my mother comes with me.; Is that MY black dog; Just after seven we turned her; The life falls shut,; The day after my mother died; And the bit about the answer. Immense gratitude to the Lannan Foundation for a residency during which much of this book took shape, and The MacDowell Colony for a residency during which it found its final form. To everybody at AJB, especially Carey Salerno, Alyssa Neptune, Mary Austin Speaker, and Julia Bouwsma, my great appreciation for your gracious guidance. To Gale Mead, my thanks for your sharp eyes.

Tess, Kathleen, Cort, Lisa, Alan, Jeanne, Jan, Betsey, Madeleine, Andrea, Dennis, Terry, and the Horsewomen: thank you, my dear friends, for your advice and encouragement. To Ramon, Silvia, and Parry, my love.

I bring her coffee and a bun, and a linen napkin, but Jesus Haploid Christ, as her grandfather the geneticist would say, I mean how many linen napkins does one person need? How many linen napkins the size of small tablecloths does one person need LVS embroidered on each corner, and who was LVS anyway? Well, lets see, my mother begins, LVS,Lilian Vaughan Sampson, would have beenyour great-grandmother, the namegoing back to an orphan, a boywho took his sisters married name,becoming Sampson in the ships logand in this way we lost trackof that side of the family. In the hills above Rincon a woman is leaving jugs of fresh water outside the Rincon Water Works before locking the metal doors. Rincon, where the Rio Grande turns back on itself like the crook of an arm before heading south to become Rio Bravo del Norte. Rincon, a stop for water on the journey north. The United States of America Does not extend refugee status To Mexicans.

And when there was nothing left for her to do but die, I brought my mother home with me. I put her in the stone cabin by the vineyard, cabin of her X and now dead husband, my father, cabin he called The Fortress in those years his mother came to live there. Came to die. With the mediocre portraits of her three children hung at the foot of her bed, I tried to joke that she now was trapped into looking at our heads. And, trapped thusly, she did what nobody could have predicted: she developed a sense of humor. An emergency sense of humor.

That dark room in which we finally spoke. Remember how you wouldnt give upyour tonsils? All those years they floatedin formaldehyde? Shes sitting in bed with impeccable posture. Dots of blood speckle the back of her cotton nightgown. Her laugh now sounds like her mothers laugh a high crooning. And Im remembering Cheracol the sticky bottle of red cough syrup, my sticky hands, the swelling vapor-love of codeine, and then my tonsils, sloughing all those years in their baby-food jar, how Id shake them my own private snow globe.

We are lying in the big bed and she says, Are things between us good? Yes Mom, things between us are good.

Dont you think? I say. No. No? You dont think things between us are good? No. No? Then tell me Mom, tell me and well talk about it. No. No? You wont tell me? No. Behind the filing cabinet in my office, a mouse begins its three-day-rot. In animal darkness, before the first day of harvest, I walk up the vineyards main avenue thumbnail moon, and the floodlight from the big barn. Clanks and shouts. The squat stone structures of the homestead vanish, its layers of ghosts flicker and go out.

The black dog Leo follows me almost invisible when I look back: he floats,a low-lying, uncomplaining black cloud. Day by day, I hum to the dog and the moon and the vineyard, I guess,Let me see you more clearly. Love is a ticket, whatever love is. And to where I could not say. I bring breakfast, balancing the tray across the gravel to her cabin: the evil eye. I bring fresh sheets: the evil eye.