Mother's Day

I don’t want to talk about it but

she had a hard life in daily combat

with the marketplace, the neighbors,

the landlord, (that momser)

and good-for-nothing-me

when I was playing basketball

while she schlept the bags from the A&P.

But I don’t to talk about it, how she saw

cars as assassins and trucks were worse,

how she squeezed some life from my hands

crossing the street.

How she could curse in the language of the shtetl

as she mopped the floor every Friday night

laying down newspapers, all that black and white.

But I don’t want to talk about 

how she demanded cross-ventilation,

never mind the four-story walk-up.

She knew plenty, knew the price of cottage cheese,

how to get the best cuts from the butcher

in the midst of flypaper and sawdust,

how to spot the grocer's thumb on the scale (that gonif).

But I do want to talk about how 

her love survived her aggravation.

She was the foot soldier who suffered

in the trenches of her imagined war.

How she must have been tormented

by her six brothers yet                             

she found my father, orphaned at two,

how she tutored him through college,

how she knew he could settle her down

with his inexplicable calm,

his ease in this world

even though she was never at home in it

but they made a team

and when she finally called a truce

with the street, (but not Wall St.)

with that skirmish within

there was a hint of a mellow mother 

I hardly knew.

I want to talk about how

she could almost take in the flowering magnolia

I pointed out as she drove from the back seat

reminding me to just watch the road.