Some Sunday

Before sleep, and testing the worrisome gas pilots, you saw a spirit
smudging the full moon’s face, and begged not to let those clouds abridge
that moment, not to blot out your mother's image. But they did. And in you, a lamp
might have burned its fuel: no last chance to reach up and take hold
of that white, reproachful look. What else could have matched it:
the face in the open casket, the wisps of white hair, tatted lace

filigreed about the neck? High over the patio’s trellis
loomed your mother’s ghost. Then, in the sky’s great bog, her spirit
submerged into its filaments. And you slunk back into your average
house, and saw things perhaps the way they really were: no lamp
quite as bright as that moon now; where there was once a husband to hold,
nowadays the portly Pomeranian coiled about your feet at night; the matching

laminate provincial dressers and the lumbering armoire that didn’t quite match,
the one he called “the confessional”—how droll—and the curtains laced
back against the window to let the moon paint the patterned spirits
across the quilt. In this room, you slept; he, in another. And what was Bridge
Street this far from her stony grave, ambled over by the bored Irish lambs
amid the drizzly pasture? What left was there of a marriage, whole

at first, then slowly given over to the dull disintegration when the hole
between the giddy, girlish past and the sober, ancient present, widens and matches
the mood of that first, sullen, drag-out fight some thirty years ago. If he lays
another hand on you, you'll end it there, take heed. It won’t be the spirit-
broken mother who bundled up her youngest, and cried with him on the foot bridge
of Grant Park until frost bit through grizzled afternoon and the lamp

posts frowned over the wrack of leaves below. Thinking how you lampered
home then, my mother, what amazement to watch you, years later, hold
my arm one dark Sunday night, dash from the Dunns’ cottage—matchless
and sure-footed through the treacherous bog and boots laced
tighter, as though they were keeping both our nerves secure—and spearhead
the trek back to your father's cottage. How did you bridge it,

cross that fear in the years before you died? When did you take umbrage,
at last, with the moon and its misery? With a husband's bedroom lamp
out by eleven, and the quiet remainder of a Sunday night to hold
your hand into the dull, forthcoming week? I see you now among images
of a different sort: gazing down, lucid and cool, upon the empty place
where you used to live. I see you before that confessional in higher spirits,

your ghost blustering the lace curtains, and clutching three matches:
one to hold beneath the guilty house; one, to bring down the foot bridge; and
one to blaze the lamp which, through the long night, I know, will spirit you. 

© Karl J. Sherlock