Susan Stenson
The Crazy Maps
Mother dies in a hospital bed in Peterborough.
thirty miles north of where she was born.
The leaves turn and fall into snow, slippery roads tonight,
a storm of memory in the headlights and this new one bullies
its way to centre stage. The truth: she’s gone.
It’s snowing. We can’t find Father.
When he hears the news, he drives in circles,
lost in the cul-de-sacs south of the city, amazed
how streets he’d driven all his life narrow and disappear.
In his red car, window cracked an inch, smoke fumes
a thin line toward starlight. Cigarette after cigarette
dropped in the suburbs on the crazy maps of grief.
A stranger, arriving after midnight, can’t say
where he’s been, coat open, tie askew,
everybody thinking he was the one who would go first.
Silence replaces her and snow spins a requiem
outside the window with city lights fading
under full cloud, the first hours without her.
This early fall morning. October, no one speaks
of the future or of the past. We are stuck
in private thoughts, the swirl and pull of winter,
sounds we hear when we sleep, furnace, fridge, fact.
Surely, we had a hand in it. Surely, had we known
some other way to love, she would have made it home.
0 1st Prize, Poem of the Year Contest 2004
Arc 53, Winter 2004
Arc 53, Winter 2004
