KAREN MANDELL

True Life

In fourth grade I learned the nym words: Mrs. Green
in perfect cursive (also new that year) wrote synonym
homonym antonym on the board already alarmingly
blurry (too much reading, Rose has continued to say,
too many words). Rose doesn't believe in synonyms.
A friend's apartment was big (perhaps very) - no need
for large grandiose huge, interlopers muddying
the Celtic pool. In another life she was a Celt;
that memory faded with the blue stripes painted on her body.
She insists, still, on little words of house and home.
We had a couch, tasseled and brass-tacked damask,
no sofa davenport loveseat. For cooking we had pots
and pans. Rose didn’t believe in cookbooks. She had one,
a gift from both daughters, kept in her bedroom closet.
I read the recipes; we’d need saucepot, skillet, stockpot,
sieve. Rose said they were pots pans and strainer.
Didn’t match up; saucepots simmered their gravies, skillets sizzled
their lamb chops (which Rose shoved into the broiler, brillo-scoured
heart of darkness.) Pots and pans? Knobble-bottomed,
dented, scraped, scarred survivors of ordeal by fire.
Strainer? Rose stomping around the kitchen, draining stringbeans,
noodles; yes, getting food on the table strained her–
eat, she said, no talking until you’re done.
And no reading at the table. She didn’t mince words,
plain talk, plain  food. She tamped us down, like packed
brown sugar in a cookie recipe. Outside, her roses flushed
and blanched as the light changed. She left us at dusk to tend
her quiet children before crickets and tree frogs cut the air,
their insistence and urgency so like my own.

copyright 2003 KAREN MANDELL

KAREN MANDELL

Like Stepping Out of Your Clothing

You stopped childhood like Rose turned off the fire
under her pots: flame extinguished with a click.
You walked away like abandoning sleep, its mists
and tendrils clinging to your arms, your bare legs.
Having made your decision you brushed yourself off, sat down
at your desk. Your work: word problems, fill in the blanks,
multiple choices whittled down to one–
best student in junior high. Ontology,
oncology, words whistled past your ears
like meteors, leaving no mark. Words grew to phrases
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. You gathered a wisp
of meaning: as embryo you traveled through stages,
fish, lizard, swimming in Rose's warm bath, emerging
hairless yet mammalian, your blood as warm as hers.

Outside, your friends' voices carried on sound waves;
shrieks, laughter, shouts melded into high pitched
wordless calls, familiar as bird songs or spring rain
pelting the roof. You remember laying your head
on your desk, willing yourself not to respond.
Martin brought you offerings, Good Humor bars:
He wasn't sure what to make of you. No one
urged you to stay inside. Silly child,
you thought you had things worked out. Leave childhood
behind like an outgrown dress. Standing at the gates
of the temple, denied entry, you never quite became
an adult. You hadn't finished the child's curriculum,
earning incompletes in cartwheels, card games, camping.
Stumped by the c words, among others.

Even now, especially now, when children
play outside at dusk, you stand at the window
of your study. In the tangled water of dreams,
you breathe through gill slits,
you weave  clawed legs through strands of cress
and with your tail you stir up the depths.

copyright KAREN MANDELL

comment/contact KAREN MANDELL