Self-improvement, and: Taking Care of My Mother, and: A Note Regarding Your Collection of Sparrows, and: Providence Hospital, Portland Oregon

Abstract

Self-improvement, and: Taking Care of My Mother, and: A Note Regarding Your Collection of Sparrows, and: Providence Hospital, Portland Oregon Michelle Patton (bio) Self-improvement When you went to the gymI smoked all the Marlboro Redsand drank the last beer, thinkingof your salty beard. Now we don't eat meat,you quit smoking, and I read self-help books.There is but one small leverin the damned city of my brainand I can't quite find it. You call me Cheswick,say when the ash of my cigarette gets long like that,it's a sign of mental illness, like your father,his ash curving dangerously round the bend.Mine, I tap at just the right moment,still a prisoner to this grammar, this lacklusterlanguage of the lucid and the sane.Now my cigarettes burn your new car,yellow my fingertips, cloud the airbetween us; but I still lovethe snowy filters, boozy with red lipstick,the little punch to the chest, little rebels in the blood.Smoke with me tonight, let's smolderunder a moon that burns a holeclean into the night sky. [End Page 177] Taking Care of My Mother It's 110 in Fresno, and when I checkOn my mom, she has rippedThe DO NOT TOUCH signOff the thermostat and turned the heat on again. I tape it up and we spend hoursTrying to find her cigarettes. I find new jeansUnder the mattress, and her green sewing kitIn the hall closet. These days, she misplaces My name and asks where I was born,But this green sewing kitHas been in the same spot for 40 years,Complete with thimbles and thread. When I open it, I see my motherAs she used to be, glasses on her noseFingers quick and capable on the needle,The smell of bread filling the house.Back then her oven still worked, back then She would give me a ball of doughAnd let me braid it while I watched herKnead and roll, and knead and rollThen brush butter on the golden loaves. Later at Walgreens, I take too longLooking through each aisle for somethingThat might change my mother's life.I settle on more tape and cigarettes [End Page 178] And a pair of warm slippers.When I give them to her, she holds themLike a baby and says, a gift for me?In a few days I will force her From her house, and she will hit meAnd curse me, say I am not her daughter,But for now she saysI was always her favorite. A Note Regarding Your Collection of Sparrows I've spent this morning listening to your sparrows,the ones you asked me to check for form and number,but each soft bird I lifted distracted me with gossipabout your heart, the other cities you've loved, the other women.Only one sparrow mentioned me at all, and quietly,amid the little beating of its heart, I heard my nameand the name of this town where you've settledfor scrambled eggs and middle-aged love. I'm not sayingI'm not embarrassed of all the romance novelsI read in my 20s, and how much I wanted to be your great city,or at least your pretty good city, like Brusselsthat bright morning we woke from crazy dreamsand crazy fights to climb out onto the fire escapewith coffee and cigarettes, me in my thrift store dressof pale yellow, the old city was below us, and the sleepstill warm in your eyes. If someone told me that story,I would envy that couple their crazy fights, their sunlit morning,and maybe love is only a story, one told to a friend,or to ourselves in the dark before sleep, before we waketo find the other whistling and making eggs. [End Page 179] Providence Hospital, Portland Oregon After the second stroke, my father's voiceIs the soft lamplight of childhoodLike the night I confessed to stealingAnd he said in the dark...