Midwestern Summer: My Dead Mother as Muse

  Dana Roeser         

My mother doesn't
like me nosing into her life
in the afterlife
any more than she
liked me nosing into it
in this one. Witness, the
ratcheting buzz of the cicada -
that's her way of saying,
Bug off.
Josie gets to do it. Her mother
loved her. She made a little shrine
with a skull knife
on it and her mother
knocks the knife down, says hello. My mother
teases me with thistle fluff,
wafting by my windshield
as I sit stalled in traffic on I-94
in Chicago. I am dying
to go to the bathroom, creep
inch by inch for two hours. Thistledown,
nonchalant fairy, drifts unharmed
between the twin axles
of a Mack truck. On the prairie,
my mother lures me into watching
the beautiful dragonfly,
brown bars embossed on its
glistening transparent wings,
its little white lobster
tail curled under; she lets me think it
a shining emissary from the
other world, then laughs
when I open the folklore
reference book and discover
that the dragonfly, often known
as the "mosquito hawk,"
is also nicknamed "the Devil's
darning needle" and likes to
sew children's mouths shut - their nose, ears,
and whole heads, too, if
necessary - when they speak
out of turn. Likewise, the bronze diamond-patterned
snake reclining in the path -
she lets me mull that one
over, as I leap three feet in the air.
The orange monarch with black
and white spotted regal
head resembles her. It lands on a sprig
of golden rod, looks at me
priggishly, asks me to pay
obeisance. The petals of each lavender cone flower
chirp love me, love me not through the
whole damned meadow. I never end up
with the petal I want. Goldfinches follow their
zigzag radar, while I lurch off
in search of the new ripe
blackberries my mother leaves for me
every day on the bush
under the horse chestnut.
Then suddenly a bramble pops
up from the path
and hooks my leg:
"Do you think it's a picnic
here in the Bardo?"
Purple lupine, black-eyed Susans.
The shining hip-high grass. Coming around
a curve in the newly
mown path, I flush a flock
of wood thrushes. Among them is a blue bird -
gorgeous, preternatural.
I remember the new
black silk pantsuit I wore at my mother's
funeral, as if I could ever
approach the dead's
iridescent splendour. I hear the sound of
birdcall, my mother's
laughter, watch the exotic
bluebird vanish down the creek bed
into the thicket of
the other world,
leaving me to choke
on the dust of this.