The Rural Sublime, and My Mother's Bedjacket

Abstract

The Rural Sublime, and My Mother's Bedjacket Sydney Lea (bio) the only sensible impression left is, "I am nothing!" —Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Rural Sublime Farmwives conjure elaborate quilts.Woodworkers busy themselves at their stations.No shortage at all of craftspeople here,but however deft these artisans,their work's no balm for my sudden unease.Today I've sampled maple ballsand poutine, and from a provisory bleacher,heard the roars of the Tractor Pull,and outside of airplanes I couldn't see,the gunmetal clouds dropping ever downward. I'm at the Tunbridge World's Fair,set in a town from a picture postcard.I've been awed by oxen with legs so longand stout that if my eyes didn't wanderto mammoth heads (we're all so small)I'd imagine black-and-white trunks of trees—the Holsteins—and winey red—the Herefords.There's a scattering too of paler breedslike Brahma or Charolais. All wonders. Wonders everywhere indeed:two-hundred-pound Hubbard squashes and pumpkins,Brobdignagian potbelly hogs—"Kevin Bacon," "Spamela Anderson,""Tyrone the Terrible"—that plod through the finalPig Race, intent on the cookie reward.Though I feel the weather grow ever grimmer,the announcer rattles his comic wordsat the crowd, consisting mostly of parentswith enthusiastic sons and daughters. [End Page 163] Are they gripped like me by nameless fears?This morning, I shuddered less when leaningfrom a Ferris wheel car or crazily spinningin the Tilt-a-Whirl or the Whizzer Demonthan when standing right here. Pink cotton candycones look like torches, puny beaconsin evanescing afternoon.The ozone scent of imminent lightningfills the air like the whiff of corn dogs,funnel cake, hush puppies frying. [End Page 164] My Mother's Bedjacket Its color soothed me. It might have been called,if not quite rightly, rosy.Nothing has matched it since I was small. The fabric must have been something like velvet.It felt more than merely soft.Since those days, in fact, I've touched nothing like it. The pillow she used in unsettling darknessas she lay by my gentle fathershared the smell of that supple garment. Was its fragrance artificial or ratherthe scent of a lovely young womanbefore years and liquor conspired to take her? It seems I still ache for that old aroma.It hasn't been replicated,will never be. How did I climb over the four-poster's rails, or did she lift me?I hope she lifted me.I've resolved the sorrowful rage that eddied between us too soon for too long a time.I forgive her, yes: after all,I had a part in every storm. With a coarsened will, for decades—well afterthat father died and left mebroken—I fought to turn my mother back to what she could be no more.I cursed her stomach-churningbreath as I hauled her up from the floor, [End Page 165] as I tried to scream away her roughness,to shout her red face back to pink:all futile, given her whiskey-deafness. But still this longing, no matter how faint,to climb and lay me downnear that odd old hue and odor and scent. [End Page 166] Sydney Lea Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His twentieth book, and his thirteenth collection of poems, Here, appeared from Four Way Books in late 2019. In spring 2021, Vermont's Green Writers Press will publish Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, his collected newspaper columns from his years as Vermont Poet Laureate (2011–15). A mock-epic graphic poem, The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, produced in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka, is due in autumn 2020. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications