Page 8
The Sow r
October 1984
Visit
My grandmother calls crying and he's gruff.
Sf La nc right to make htm fed
so bd He tells me she's ken bad
each time she's called. Bad,
the way she was when Grand-dad died
and she wouldn't be consoled for anything.
An old house Is an old house after ill
His past belongs to him now,
not to her or to that house.
It's likely any day now to fall down.
Why is she behaving like a child?
He thinks if he does not tell it
1 wi!I forget his story:
how each day in summer, hearing
the train whistle, he jumped
into the saddle elided up,
climbed the hill across the trad
to wave passengers west by cos-boy hst
Having offered hinsseif as sysshol
standing on that LA he thirds
now he can just tale fcissdf back,
dissolve his image in the eyes
of children who tugged at mothers' sleeves:
Look, a real cowboy. He waved at me.
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Suppose that cowboy is the only thing
to stand up to the hiUs and plains
along a flat day's ride through memory.
And suppose it is the only way I have
of seeing him besides suited and tied,
driving away each day of my childhood.
Returned from the last visit,
the dosing on the house,
he waves away my mentioning it
His hand like the hand of a boy
leaving the saddle horn
to brush away a fly buzzing his face,
while the other holds on lightly to the reins,
it forgets that it is holding anything.
. Jadish Scrclcrgar
David CreamerThe Sower
My Grandmother's Dolls
.Now that I am grown
am! can do no further harm.
(iraml;iia brings then) out
cne by one, idling me their names.
1 tell Grandma I am pregnant.
Si. i !m!d shi! her china baby uol! to me.
1 much the doll's p:M"! iin curls.
its long white muslin gown.
the lace u'ong the hem. I bring
its cool cheek up to my own
My mother told me once
that Grandma took care of four
younger children on the farm
until she married Grandpa.
Now, she thought, life will finally begin.
Six months later she was pregnant.
I hand Grandma back her doll.
For a long time she is still,
holding it against her bosom.
Then she begins rocking in her chair,
rocking and patting the doll's back.
Her eyes are pressed shut and her tears
drop onto the china baby's back.
The creak of her chair is a voice
reciting the names of the living,
the names of the dead, and they are
the same name over and over again.
Judith Somberger
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Now Is the time for coyotes
to stop crying In our ears;
to sell the Sandhills home
and lose the town: its cattle
history, the hills, the hills.
Grandmother leads me to the quilta
folded on her mother's bed
One for each grandchild, our births
predicted in the heavy winters
of her mother's labor. Choose,
she says, and there are no surprises,
no new patterns: stars,
the wedding ring, log cabin.
Sure, you remember Great-grandmother,
my mother insists. I don't, and try
reading her face in the yellowed newspaper.
Obituary calls her face a china doll's.
Mom says no, she was tough.
Killed a rattlesnake trespassing
in her garden with the cane
they all believed she leaned oa
Just as they supposed her husband her support
before her cutthroat suicide in their front yard
And she had gone on folding down the quilt
from her small body each day before dawn.
Gone on feeding children
and chickens given children's names,
gathering eggs.
I try tracing the hand that struck the snake,
its knuckles coarsened against wind and burrs,
the grit under her nails from garden work,
in the only map I have of her,
the quilt I choose: star pattern.
Here to trace her veins in tiny stitches,
here to find her hands in five-point stars.
My last night in the Sandhills
the stars come out in patterns I look for
standing knee-deep in wet pasture.
Star chart against the sky, I turn
until I'm sure north points to north,
try piedng stars into stories I hold.
But it won't work. Stars out there
are close together as quilt stitches,
dose in their vast distances as relatives.
The patterns I brought with me do not fit.
Perhaps she knew those myths,
their foreign names, but chose
to give the stars an order
she inherited from women's hands,
one closer to home. Now I squint
to see them through her needle's eye,
and looking must be sharper,
less detached It is chilly here
at night even in summer, and I fold
around myself what she has left,
knowing its warmth was not meant for me.
But in the code of stitches
my fingers read her will
to cover all she loved, and I am covered.
Judith Somberger
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