Post on 16-Jan-2017
University of Northern Iowa
My Mother's PastelsAuthor(s): Alison TownsendSource: The North American Review, Vol. 287, No. 3/4, Annual Summer Fiction Double (May -Aug., 2002), p. 8Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25126783 .
Accessed: 12/06/2014 14:41
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chunk of the 1980s living out her
youthful fantasies in Port
Townsend. At her house she has a
framed broadside of a poem by
Henry Carlisle, titled "Off Port
Townsend One Month Before the
Arrival of the U.S.S. Ohio." There's a line we both like about the sub
marine "staining the scenery," how
it "slips through like grease." Carlisle captures that feeling that
flooded my heart on a solitary beach walk at apricot-and-magenta
dawn when I spotted the Ohio mov
ing across the horizon like some
misshapen whale, eclipsing all the
other vessels with its enormity, and
was reminded that in this place where I felt more alive and more
suffused with Edenic hope than ever before, death, a collective
death of proportions the world had never known, lurked nearby, a
malevolent partner. Even the
broadside is its own paradox, a relic
from a place in the world where
wordsmiths flourished, where peo
ple would take time to make their
own paper, swirling drops of ink
into water onto the paper using the
Japanese Suminagashi process,
embracing an art form from our for
mer enemies-turned-nuclear allies
on the Pacific Rim, and compose
type, one letter at a time, to print
one hundred or so copies of one
poem: all in a time when we had to
protect one another from those
charged with protecting us.
MICHAEL SPENCE
Father Gathers His Breath
In the early dark, I'd wake?those mornings, before you shaved
To leave for work, you'd come in
And kiss me goodbye. Moonlight Washed the room the palest blue
As though it were underwater. Your whiskers felt
Like small needles; Five years old, sometimes I'd lie still,
Pretending to be asleep.
You'd blow gently on my face, and wait
For my eyes to open.
The unseen light Of x-rays found the spots of light growing Quietly in your lungs. Your last year,
You went back to the Florida beach
Where you swam when young.
Your short, clipped strokes
Fought the water, not letting it touch
Your face. Home again, you hammered
The flight of stairs you'd put off fixing? Each whack I like a gunshot?and sanded the rail
Smooth as your shaven jaw.
You died at home in August, A blue moon about to rise. When mother called,
You lay on your couch, your breath rapid Like a diver getting ready To enter the sea. I think you hung on,
Waiting for me, so she wouldn't be alone.
Kneeling beside you, I called
Your name, but you had begun the arc.
I watched your eyes close. Your whiskers
Prickled my lips. I stopped myself From blowing on your face.
ALISON TOWNSEND
My Mother's Pastels
My mother's pastels came in a thin, green box from France
that slid open, its slotted drawer filled with sticks of solid
color that looked good enough to eat, words like fuchsia, chartreuse, bleu celeste printed on their tattered wrappers, names
of colors I had never imagined. "Toutes les nuances du spec
tre solaire," it said on the label. "All the colors of the rain
bow," my mother translated, her voice changing around the
words the way her face did when she held a pastel in her
hand.
Mostly I just looked, but sometimes I tried them, trading my fat Crayolas and stubby pencils for those wands of pigment and light that grabbed at the page and dusted my fingers with
grains of color like pollen. I sat close beside her, moving my hand over the sketchbook the way she did, trying to copy
every angle and gesture, pictures of trees flowing from my fin
gers like water, my mother's words naming the shivery feeling
that came when the world outside fell away and there was
nothing but color between me and the page.
She never kept her sketches, but I felt them sometimes,
forming out there somewhere in a place just beyond my gaze as she plucked chickens, put up tomatoes, bent to put chains
on the rusty Plymouth wagon that ferried us to school. I don't
know what she saw, only the colors she gave me.
Which is why I keep her pastels in my desk drawer, to remind
myself how many colors there are in life, shading in a bright band from red at one end to violet at the other. Toutes les
nuances du spectre solaire. All the variations of sunlight filtered
through the prism of rain. My mother the artist. My mother
the 50s mom. My mother, a woman I will never know, dead of
cancer when I was nine, mute and mysterious as the snapshot
of her sketching in college, a pastel raised in mid-stroke, the
drawing board balanced on her lap like a child.
8 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW May-August 2002
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