#90: "After a Stroke, My Mother Examines a Picture of the Icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe" by Tom Daley

~This poem previously appeared in Rhino (2011).

After a Stroke, My Mother Examines a Picture of the Icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe

Lady, why is your countenance

the color of vole feet

draggling from the jaws of a cat?

What tribe of mud daubers

stung stars onto your mantle?

Who names the fumbles

that topple from your breasts?

Your counterspell blunts

the jagged crescent

of every campesino’s

charmed and smoldering scythe.

Your spooled mouth waits to unfurl

the ticker tape of your vow.

In torchlight, your eyebrows

fly to heaven on thin wings of soot.

Only the moon survives

the crush of your heel.

Virgin of Guadelupe, I pray for your handshake,

I pray for your ribs, I pray for your hips,

the ones tugged dry

while expelling that bountiful head

ordained to gnaw

all the hangnails of history.

Steer me, Lady, through the lightning

that browns the mountains.

Drown the infections

that flush my cough into a gargle.

Virgin, who never burned a supper,

strip me of strangles, grizzles,

knots, of scratched jazz

skipping the shadows

out of my sleep.

Princess of the Aztecs,

thread my poncho with roses this winter

that I might adorn that tomb slab

where even cayenne would cool,

where your son’s brain was looted

of its chemical salves,

and where his feet, which stretched the sea

smooth as a conga head,

refused to rest

at right angles to the ground.

Kiss me, mother of Mexico’s hope—

your little mouth

is still rusty with smoke.

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THE STORY BEHIND THE POEM

A number of years ago, I wrote a series of poems in the voice of my mother, or rather in the voice of a persona part my mother, part something very different from her external personality. After she had a stroke, the license I took with her character found new vectors to follow. In this poem, my mother, a semi-lapsed Catholic (she went to Mass but rejected the orthodoxy), mixes her skepticism and her earlier intense devotion as she considers the Virgin of Guadelupe. At once compassionate, cosmopolitan, and slightly disparaging, my mother would have indulged herself with this kind of hallucinatory engagement with the icon of the miracle attested to by a Mexican peasant only with an ambivalent ardor.

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ABOUT TOM DALEY

Tom Daley leads workshops in poetry and memoir writing at the Online School of Poetry, Boston Center for Adult Education, and Lexington Community Education. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Fence, Harvard Review, In Posse Review, Barrow Street, Conte, Poetry Ireland Review, Diagram, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology; Poets for Haiti; and Unlocking the Poem. He is the author of Every Broom and Bridget, a play about Emily Dickinson and her servants, which he performs as a one-man show.