Run the Red Lights

When my mother sent me for cigarettes

I'd buy a candy bar too, sign her name

to the book, and walk out with the green-

and-white carton, Virginia Slims 100s,

under my arm, the chocolate already gone.

Sugar, my god! like newspaper cartoon

panels spread out on the kitchen table

where I'd pretend to smoke, imitating her.

After the corner store closed we made our groceries

at Dillon's, joined the impersonal. A villain

snatched her purse there when I was away at college

and on the phone she told me, excitedly,

how Topeka police chased the culprit, and she named

each street, each intersection and landmark,

the whole adventure, just for her.

I'm grateful now to the sedentary house

though I've grown as large on candy as John Candy.

My older brothers left home and our meals stayed

the same, a skillet high with beef Stroganoff,

pot roast in broth, chili con carne,

cheese sandwiches with mayo, flocks of fried chicken.

Then the whole house went on a diet of cold

tofu cubes, a broken disk of lemon in a water glass,

cottage cheese measured onto lettuce,

and then back to London broil the next night,

no questions asked—lovely. We were emotions

without form, and I carry it with me,

not just in frame, arm and jowl and belly,

but here in the intergalactic space of written

thought, the infinite stage where we come

talk to each other. Sugar makes me curious.

After Katrina, I took the diet where you eat meat,

and lost almost a hundred pounds from a surfeit

of bacon, sautéed pork medallions, beef & lamb.

The weight fell away like a knight's armor

after a joust. I bought shirts at a regular store.

I played softball and ran bases, bounded them,

as if on a new, more forgiving planet. And

I went crazy, evened out, broke down again,

inconsolable at the finale of Six Feet Under,

tears for my mother, postponed, and more

torrented for delay. Opening the book of grief

requires you read all the way to the end,

every time. Driving to work, I stopped

bewildered at a gas station, paid cash for two

Snickers providing more salvation

than I have ever known from religion's acres.

I write about the West and the South and home,

their tenderness and trouble and the weird spirits

breaking the best days. Still I find myself down

by the river at twilight. On the bridge deliberate-

seeming people walk by like victorious aliens,

past the consequential palaces lit as before,

the faces turning in their rotisseries.

In profile, my mother looked like Alex Chilton,

lead singer of the Box Tops, and then Big Star.

I used to see Chilton around New Orleans,

in line at the grocery store, walking down Esplanade.

My mother also had a solo career, playing

solitaire and watching her own TV in the kitchen

and dying before everyone else. Dying, Chilton

urged his wife to run the red lights, his last words,

and when I had to leave my mother in the hospital

that was hard, and then again at the funeral

I set a marble under her folded hands,

don't know why. It's been ten years.

Ten fingers, the closed eye of each knuckle,

each nail its years' fullest day moon.

Which shed the other? My scar from opening

a window, such force to move the wood frame,

so little to shatter glass it held. To be held so

again. Ten years, so forty seasons, eight endings

and beginnings, well, always a gust in them

which is the sigh of how she would note leaf and bird.

One hand to hold the coffee cup, one the cigarette.

The red ember she became at midnight. Red light. Eye.

Source: Run the Red Lights (2016)