Parts of Speech: Elegy for My Mother
For she was a hoarder of her own heart, for
all was a tenderness too far.
Let shadows be a weight and cool.
Let consolation austere.
Let the severe way of things.
Pray for ice, planed and polished. Pray for
the shut heart.
Wherefrom fall the shadows and the shut?
From sorrow like ice, like old moss, old scars,
like strain.
Even the small plants open
their leaves, the milkmaids and the modesty
and the lady’s smock, and the red sorrel which looks like a big clover.
I try to follow their roaring, but stop
at disresemblances. I am not lifted up.
I keep to myself such
ways of care as I am able.
I’m homesick for my heart, my tongue’s first habits
of mind. Afflicted and various,
I am blocked from finding.
We did not grow round each other like vines.
Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’ –
an intimate grammar. Love
for the bodies of words.
You scored highest in the whole country on the Latin exam,
remorari…
I look for your body –
and find it in the bodies of words. I finger
their jagged grains, their silky underparts:
Gold, rust, rose, blood, milk.
Aurum, rusticum, roseus, snaguinem, lacte.
Stuck to you through parts of speech, searching for blood.
Your least instruction a tenderness too far.
[Note: the italicized line is from Elizabeth Bishop’s Over 2000 and a Complete Concordance]
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Sarah Stemp is a poet and psychologist/psychoanalyst in New York City. She has published poetry on various topics relating to the role of grief and mourning in the creation of something new.