The same road that goes to 100 Oaks Mall
also goes to the doctor’s office — be brave, be brave.
One thing your mother says is that she’ll never lie to you,
say that you’re only going shopping when you’re really going
for your allergy shot (how often — weekly?), and as far as you know,
that’s true. She didn’t. Still, how are you supposed to be brave
when bravery does nothing to protect you, when no amount of
begging makes your mother turn the car around or decide
that today’s a better day for shopping, after all?

For some reason, someone in the produce department
at The Andersons General Store on Bent Tree Road
is talking about abortion, and for some other reason,
my mother (who is peeling corn and tossing the husks
into the provided plastic trash barrel) ventures to say
to this stranger that she agrees, that she, too, is pro-life
and against the killing of babies. I back up toward
the pyramid of honeydews, wanting to disappear
because I can’t make this moment disappear, this
reminder that, along with all the other things she is,
my mother is an Ohio suburban Republican, after all,
and anti-abortion. I couldn’t argue with them then,
this stranger and my mother, and I can’t argue now —
The Andersons is gone, my mother is gone, the corn
is gone, too, of course, and Bent Tree Road may as well be.

To know and to be known,
that’s all it is, a hunger for place,
the feeling that change is always possible
but never required. Being, at last,
an immovable object. Unmoved. At last.

You can choose to block it out if you want,
with a syndicated rerun of M*A*S*H*,
but then you might miss something important
in the quiet quiet loud quiet of your parents in the kitchen,
your father telling your mother about his day at work,
your mother giving him advice, your father telling her —
what? (I never really caught that part, only that
often, he yelled, and sometimes she did, too),
and then it’s time for dinner, and no one has to
talk at all because the news is on —
the nuclear arms race, maybe, or Iran Contra,
and everyone is tense, but no one has said it,
that you’ll be moving again; if anyone knows yet,
at least no one has said it. Yet.

When Mount St. Helens erupted
in the spring of 1980, I made much of it,
telling my first-grade classmates in Minnesota
how close we’d lived to that mountain —
not true at all, but I needed something
to secure myself as something other than
the new kid, having gone through days and days
of crying over math worksheets, how many pennies
to buy a whistle, how many pink erasers for a quarter?
Anyway, the drama of a disaster was useful
in crafting my new persona at age 7,
and also, I dabbled in meanness, one time
telling a boy who asked me how to spell electricity
that it was E-L-L-E-E-T-T-T-R-I-C-I-T-T-Y,
causing (once he realized) a disastrous fury
of erasing on that cheap paper they gave us.
One thing I can’t remember is if it was him or me
who drew Mount St. Helens, a better-than-stick-figure
man falling off the top; probably there was lava, too.

____________________________________________________________________
12 (to be explained)

But what is there to forgive?
Life is the making of ghosts, perhaps,
for all of us, in one way or another.
If I hadn’t moved all those times,
someone else would have —
a best friend or a solid neighbor,
my world sliding down like a sandcastle,
even as I stayed in one place.
Houses move on around us, too,
only frozen in time if we have that
snapshot moment, from the car
pulling down the driveway,
watching the garage door close
one last time.

Because I’m still in love with you
on this harvest moon, but here I am
alone on the couch in my parents’ house
in Worthington Hills, lost forever

probably

watching Neil Young on Saturday Night Live
while you’re out somewhere on this Saturday night,
this harvest moon, without me, and I know

as long as I live, there will be no ache
like this one — at least I hope not, anyway.

_____________________________________________________________
12 (to explain later)

Burn like the end of a cigarette,
my mother in a terrycloth dress
drinking Pepsi Free (diet, with lemon),
and we all thought the late ’70s
would never end, Seattle
would never end, my mother
would never end. Burn like that.

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4 (to explain later)

A hint of dusty summer sun and standing water
(watch out for mosquitoes — extra large in Minnesota),
the smell of my tire swing. A few feet away, in the garage,
my old crib, fully assembled. I was eight years old,
the last baby. When I discovered it one day, and for
several days after, I climbed over the side and in.
I couldn’t have explained why — so it’s a good thing
it never did break. When it was time to sell the house,
I made my parents take down the tire swing.
Some other kid could have my room, but not that.
The crib, we sold. It didn’t need to make the move.
It was time to let it go, my mother said.
Time to let it go. 

By 1980, the world had changed around my mother
enough that, sitting at our kitchen table in Thief River Falls,
with her 20th high school reunion form in front of her,
she could not bear to write housewife or homemaker
in the blank for “occupation.” Hell’s bells, she might have thought,
valedictorian of LaSalle High School in Niagara Falls, expected
by all to do something other than raise children — but caught
between things, told that she couldn’t be a writer or lawyer
and also raise children. Hell’s bells. So, my mother lied
extravagantly, said she was an agricultural pilot,
a crop duster flying low over sunflower fields.
At the reunion, she couldn’t walk back the lie, so they
gave her the award for Most Unusual Profession —
a feather duster. It’s entirely possible that she used it.

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3 (will be explained later)