Three Poems by Kathryn Maris

The Stranger

I dream my children are little again
and, in the dream, a woman I don’t know
offers to watch them so I can dye
my hair, greying since I was young;
and though I waver – because why
surrender this windfall of borrowed time

with my ducklings, long past their time
as my ducklings, why squander it again,
not that it was squandered, but oh God why
would I leave them? –  my dream-ego knows
I must. . . because transmuting an adult to a youth
in a dream requires neurons to dive

into a dubious lair of memory where dice
are rolled in the haze and craze of time
by the unconscious, gambling that the youth-
assemblage is a faithful reflection. Again!
says my dream-son as I swing him high. No!
he says as I leave him, crying Why…?

We both cry.  As for the stranger: why
was she in the dream? Because I saw a Disney
series featuring her as a know-
all coder like my son? Gesturing at the time,
she warns, ‘Go now, don’t come again.’
I grasp that she resembles me when I was young,

but only a little; to unearth my true young
self would be to locate a shifting point on the Y
axis of time and the X axis of loss/gain.
No one has ever said, until perhaps today,
‘One day I’ll be a variable in a time-
rending dream.’ Yet here we are. Who knew? 

Yesterday my mother didn’t seem to know
if I were me or my daughter. So vulnerable and young
she seems: is she my mother or my daughter? Each time
I write a sestina I cry; I don’t know why
(this form could make anyone want to die)
I am determined to do it all again,

I think it is an affliction: to suffer narrative and time
in re-verse, the young becoming younger again
without asking why they’re not allowed to die.

Wedding Song

I turn my attention to practical matters
in emergencies, like my mother,
hell bent on buying another
black dress with long sleeves

should the emergency with my father
conclude in death. I officiate
as she tries on a black dress with sleeves
required by Greek Orthodox custom

with its robed priests officiating death,
chanting dirgy refrains over a corpse.
As per Greek Orthodox custom,
there are two wakes plus a funeral,

where refrains are sung over the corpse,
followed by the ceremony of Forty Days.
So: two wakes, a funeral and Forty Days
will require four dresses, says my mother.

But forty days later, unceremoniously
detached from the ventilator, my father is alive
and my mother requires no black dresses.
The pair hold hands as they did at their wedding,

their pearl wreaths attached by a sallow ribbon
as they looked into a camera, each a stand-in
for my imagination and its partner, projection,
when I’m not attending to practical matters. 

Phallus

Nom-du-père / Non-du-père
– Jacques Lacan

The moon is lack
an O in the night
(the mother gone
the father done)
by which ‘I’ tries to write

Kathryn Maris is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The House With Only An Attic And A Basement. She is Poetry Editor of AFM.