1.
My mother died at ninety. In her last year
her eyes were so blurred there was no place
for smiles.
2.
My first memory is my mother's tea-leaves,
double used with half a spoonful
of crisp dry makings to 'freshen them up'.
I was born in the Depression.
We had toys made from cottonreels and string.
Shirts and pants were from cast-offs.
Flour came in 2lb. bags
handkerchiefs were made from those.
We were not poor
but waste was immoral and nobody knew
where tomorrow would lead, she said.
It led to the War,
full employment and an air-raid shelter
where our own sandpit had been.
Photographs show we had trikes then
but I remember the shelter in its dug-out
and the emergency rations, the first-aid kit,
and the mould on them. It was never used in panic.
When the siren did sound that once, my mother said
she preferred bombs to the cobwebs.
3.
Cakes and biscuits: these were the years of sugar
even when it was rationed. My mother
stands in her flat-heeled shoes
and keeps us in order. We crowd in the kitchen
at the oven smell of shortbread or perhaps
macaroons. We live in that kitchen
and stuff ourselves with home-made sweets
patty cakes and stale cornflakes
made into crumbly nibbles. It is magic.
She despairs over sponges
but the icing tricks us into almost anything.
At our Grandma's house we are allowed
slivers of frothy spongecake, a treat
the adults nod over. The pecking order is maintained
though no one's kitchen is the same as Mum's.
4.
In the ninety years she made her investment in family
and at last the harvest is brought in. The years
have been walled up in her eyes. She learned
not to expect too much. Droughts and floods
are our lot and in the good seasons
she tended her garden.
Her long-standing joy was the fernery
and on hot evenings she would stand with the hose
long after we were all squatting around the radio.
It is only now that I remember things she valued
other than family, all those clamorous selves.
5.
Childhood was buttons and pushing them into tight holes
so that your braces could hold up your pants
so that your fly would hold in your dick
(we did not wear underpants until puberty);
in winter, even my slippers had buttons
and she knelt down to fix them. By the time
we could do that ourselves, our slippers
were Turkish design, like Dad's.
My mother kept bottles filled with buttons
cut off old shirts and men's trousers
and the few coloured and varied ones
from old dresses. Those were ghosts of the '20s
and time's unbelievable frivolity.
I did not believe my mother had ever owned up
to using them on a shimmery gown or some party dress.
After the War my mother's button jars
filled with mother-of-pearl and the first plastics.
We were into the age of zips.
6.
My mother had green eyes. "When I was a girl
I was lithe as a cat". But we could hardly believe
those old photos. Now, in her final shape
it is not an old child but a captive
trapped in shrinkage and silence.
The eyes that hold onto me are asking
that the debt be repaid. The only good currency
is to be there, perhaps to hold her nerveless hand.
In these last years she never, once,
referred to our father.
7.
The queen of the kitchen threw off her apron
like that. "I'm going to the retirement home
and I'll never have to cook again." The Early Kooka
stove had been our altar, not hers. It gleamed
and was never greasy. The frying pans were scrubbed
and the steel wool scoured her fingers and, later, ours.
We counted ourselves well off.
At some stage a gas hot-water system
with its pilot flame gave point to our western wall.
We would climb onto a chair to peek through the hole
in the cream enamel. "It's still on, it's still on."
we would exclaim if Mum caught us.
We grew in that kitchen, underfoot, under the table,
unbalancing the uka-ants, playing tanks and submarines,
opening cupboard doors, helping stack the groceries,
reciting our homework, eating our Saos and vegemite,
asking what's for tea. No other room belonged to us
so fully. Once, when she was in hospital,
it became a shell,
and we moved as carefully and strangely
as if it were our Grandma's tidy kitchen.
How could we believe, in all those years,
she was serving time?
8.
We define our mother in childhood
needing to take her for granted.
That is our greatest tribute:
granting her the security of our need,
asking, asking and never conscious of giving.
"I've come, mum. Here are some flowers,
something you can look at. And I'll read to you.
After that, I'll speak of the past, I'll
tell you what I remember. The things that come back -
your tennis club and you all in white,
all the neighbours who came over with sick babies
for your advice, you were the sage of young mothers.
Or the Time Of The Naughty Storm, the year
of the sunburn, the marshmallow that failed that time
and smelled of the abattoir." Does she smile?
It is my voice that smiles. It tries hard.
All my stories return to her kitchen.
It is twenty-five years since she was busy in there
and we were her real icons, slippery and unpredictable
- or perhaps predictable entirely?
9.
My mother died at ninety. In her last year
she could not speak or move but her eyes
were so important the mashy food we spooned in
might have been that last Banquet with the family
at my brother's birthday the year before.
I remember the pleasure she found in each mouthful
and the second glass of wine. One sturdy grandson
helped her to her wheelchair. Her hair was thinner
and my own skull shape stared through her humble smile.
In the last year there was no place for smiles.
When I visited from interstate I talked of events,
what I was doing, where the children were.
Now death has converted all to retrospect
my mother returns into that forties kitchen
with corsets on and a floral dress
and one discoloured tooth and a plumpness
that satisfies the need for reassurance
that the good years will fill us out forever,
and we come racing in from school
and yell out "Mum! Mum! I'm home!
Are their any bikkies in the tin?"
Though she was taken so utterly for granted then
something took: the image is clearer than any snapshot
- it moves, and the vividness takes my breath,
superimposing a warm kitchen face
on all but those frightened, final eyes.
This poem records my need, not hers.
My mother died at ninety. In her last year
her eyes were so eloquent
there was no place for smiles.
All those meals: the tribute
that must be gathered out of all those meals.
Weak tea and ordinary biscuits
have become ironic hosts. Like the old kitchen
nothing survives but this curious tribute.
My mother's eyes reduce them all
to a proper irrelevance,
an improper testament. She knows where she is.
It is the present. When will it be over?
