Archive
10/24/11
The Pond
This matchless, dazzling blue-and-gold Sunday afternoon, Fourteen days away from my mother's passing, Linda and I are traipsing along the banks of a modest pond Unobtrusively ensconced on the south side of Lindell Boulevard, Not a quarter mile east of Union, in Forest Park,
A pond my mother pointed out a hundred times, if once, A tiny body of geography, which, she'd tell me, Was the bucolic sanctuary she retreated to, repeatedly, During that season when she was pregnant with me, Between July 1940 and April 17, 1941,
A happy, serene, secluded pond she'd circle, for hours, Meditating on how she'd arrived in St. Louis, at twenty-three, So distant from her mother and father, her younger twin sisters — A lonely, uprooted North Shore Chicago girl, Adjusting to her new life with her overachieving husband . . .
A pond just a ten-minute walk from the Congress Hotel, Where the parents-to-be had resided, for nearly three years . . . A pond where she'd talk to me, With affection and intimacy I could feel even then, Confiding her uncertainties, her aspirations and dreams for me.
This warm, autumnal, time-defying interlude, I can sense her presence again, hear her voice again, That gentle, wombing voice, speaking to me, inside her again, Feel her carrying me around and around this pond — My first time back since we walked together, seventy years ago.
10/24/11
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