Wrinkles
folds
As though it could do anything but vanish my mother's life is only tiny stories now
My mother's life was plain, and there were only some small stories in my memory.
and what I remember of them afterward: how she loved to iron and drink beer on hot nights.
But the memory fades away like a pleat in the story: the memory of the mother's fondness to iron clothes while drinking beer on a hot night.
I too love to flatten wrinkles out of a shirt with light blue, or dark green, or white cuffs.
I also like to flatten the folds of the shirt, light blue, dark green, white.
Tonight I'm sipping beer, the radio's playing "Bird of Prey Blues," followed by "All for You."
Tonight I'm sipping beer too, and the radio is on first, "Raptor Bruce, and then "Just for You."
It doesn't take much to get me drunk.
I actually drink average.
Even so, I don't have enough beer to savor it.
Even so, the wine of the night was not enough for me to taste.
I finish another three shirts and imagine the wrinkles lifting off,
I finished ironing three shirts again, imagining them surrounding me,
layering and coiling themselves around me like petals of an invisible bouquet.
It's like a piece of petal on an invisible bouquet.
I think of my mother sitting in a front row of folded chairs at Fort Rosecrans as I stood to speak about the man
My mother sat in a folding chair in the front row of the International Cemetery, silently listening to me tell the story of that man,
whose uniform she ironed, the man whose ashes were slowly marched in front of us.
The man she had ironed all her life's shirt, the one who had only ashes left in an urn, held and walked slowly toward us.
This last shirt won't work with the iron.
This last shirt was not evenly hot.
It curdles in a corner, bunches and won't smooth.
Curled up in a corner and crumpled together.