How to Spell Muskogee
I.
She wants to know how to spell Muskogee, OK. I ask her why and she repeats the question. I spell the town’s name and know that I need to know more. Does a friend live there? No answer. Is she buying something from there? No answer. Is she requesting vacation information? No answer. Is she a fan of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”?
Recently, I have called the police to ask for help tracking down the Mercedes that has consumed my mother’s life. Each day she waits and expects to see a cherry red truck parked in her cracked concrete driveway. A month after my call, a detective tells me what their investigation has found out.
The people who call my mother are from Jamaica but the money is not sent directly to that sunny, marijuana besotted, befuddled island but to an old woman in Muskogee, who suffers from dementia like my mother, and according to the detective has no understanding of what she is doing. The money is forwarded to a storefront in Las Vegas.
The detective laments that they will never stop the fraud or retrieve the money. But he is encouraged. During the investigation, he is happy to report that he busted three people working out of a trailer who were “knee deep in stolen credit cards.” My mother never stops being helpful.
II.
My mother has remembered how to use
the telephone. No, I’m not Joe. I’m not Uté or Alice.
I listen and respond with half-appropriate answers.
Appropriate is beyond both our comprehensions.
It’s been at least a year since her number
was changed a third time. There has been
no request for a money-gram in all these months
or the promise of a delivery. Nothing red
in the driveway except the ferocious tulips driving
fiercely up though the remnants of late snow.
She is calling this gray March afternoon to tell
all her friends that it is snowing though she only knows
one number to dial. The snow is white.
I try to imagine other colors including radiation.
She says the yard grass and the house roofs
are white. She doesn’t know its depth, she hardly
ventures outside anymore. I tell her that it is snowing
here, too. She is surprised. She thought only her world
was turning white. We go through the checklist:
Is the dog fed and watered? Is she dressed?
Has she eaten breakfast, lunch, dinner?
What’s the number to call in case of emergency:
211, 922, 119. What is she watching on TV?
I say goodbye, I’ll call tomorrow, if she doesn’t.
She says goodbye to Joe, says give your wife a kiss,
as my world is buried deeper in white.
III.
The hinges do not soprano
a stranger’s entering.
She does not open the door.
The door has abandoned entering,
therefore, is always an egress.
Meaningful and meaningless,
swinging open, swinging closed.
No transom for her to pass secrets.
There is the window
that she does not open and cannot close.
The window closed to itself.
So much in this house closed.
The screen and pane not cleaned
in years, so one filters and the other
refracts the anxious, tired light.
Then she points out where I stand
in the backyard, moving in
and behind the semi-circle
of spruce. What do I find there?
she wants to know. I want to know.
What day, what time?
My body abandons me
to this other investigation,
to not be there but to be seen there.
Stranger in a strange land lost in this distance
amid the circling spruce as their roots
weep stones upward into needle
and bark at the back of the backyard
where a fence declares limits
and the dissolving of her limits.
The chain-link has its own cross-hatched clarity,
draws conclusions that galvanize for a short time─
not to be there but succumb
to being seen there and finding nothing
that can be spoken or reported.
• • •
Walter Bargen has published twenty-one books of poetry. His most recent books are: Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (2009), Endearing Ruins (2012), Trouble Behind Glass Doors (2013), Quixotic (2014), Gone West (2014), Three-corner Catch (2015), Perishable Kingdoms (2017), and Too Quick for the Living (2017).. He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009). His awards include a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1991), Quarter After Eight Prose Prize (1996), the Hanks Prize (1996), the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize (1997), the William Rockhill Nelson Award (2005), Short Fiction Award– A cappella Zoo (2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in over 300 magazines. www.walterbargen.com