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 .

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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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