When she’d tried to shush the families behind us,
and in front of us, and beside us, scowling
in fastidious distaste -- they were chatting, during
her grandson’s graduation; when
the ceremony had ended; when the dinner
was eaten, when we took her back
to her room in the college dormitory like a
medieval fortress, and went
over the room, with her, again --
the window, the light, the heat, the key,
the bathroom she would share with strangers --
I pretended everything was fine, but I saw,
for a moment, that my mother really had been
an orphan, she’d never for a moment had a mother
who could love her.  So I kissed her forehead, and left her
there, little pack-rat in an old stone room
with a twenty-four-foot ceiling, and I went
upstairs, and in a narrow dorm bed like a
trough my husband and I flew through the
air carolling -- now I see I was
trilling like the wren who threw the phoebe
nestling out of the back-porch nest, I was
that kind of happy, having put
my mother in durance.  For years, then,
I ate my gladness of her anxious night
without knowing I was eating it.
Weeks before her death, she smiled, and
said, “Remember that dungeon?” and I kissed her
with sudden affection toward the one who without
having been loved by her own mother
had taught me to love her and hate her, to hate and love.