Mary Legato Brownell

I don't see myself as a big dreamer. I am a small, practical dreamer; each day I live the ways in which perseverance and hope measure up to a faith in the future I did not always have. I once imagined a plan involving time for writing, editing, study, and travel. I thought big in making that plan, but in the meantime, I kept on with life. I am a stronger writer now, in part because I get up each day and keep at it. My day depends on it, but I don't know what my best work is yet. I'd like to get closer to that, and to share it with others. My work heads in two directions: sonnets describing private people in a formal way and non-metrical poems about the world around me. Stephen Dunn said that when poetry is true to itself, it is always a gesture toward others. That is where I am heading in my work.
 

LAST ITALIAN DAYS: THE GRANDMOTHER

I.
She is full of life and life's end, shining
In her winter housecoat, not quite content
To watch me work. She is the last silent
Girl in the kitchen in the cool morning,
The way she chose to live by handling
The heated iron. The careful, pliant
Dough. The eggs. When she looked at me she bent
her small grey head, and turned to the steaming
Iron. I thought again that she would tell
Me how to be. We let one another
Go in this way, her hands tired now, until
It slipped slowly along the pads of her
Worn fingertips, the delicate pizelle,
Her initials pressed into its center.

II.
The children drape themselves near her thin chest
While the snow hibiscus blooms pink lilies.
The leaves and petals may be what hurries
Them to soothe her now. There. There. The smallest
Breathes into her hair, and smooths her right wrist
Like a low pulse wing. Each of them tidies
Their fear of her death into movement, tries
To awaken her and not let her rest.
But Grandma, wizened under the covers
Limp housecoat tussled and buttoned and drawn
Against her hips, lies still, the quilt over
Her arms. These children imagine their own
Small lives without her, that if they hover
Close to her, they will bring the fever down.

III.
She is small, her spine bent and beginning
Its slow boned curve before the heavens. When
She stands, it is her shoulders that tighten,
Tremble and shift in the weak, wintering
Light, her fingers that move and pause, easing
The crochet hook, the fine thread, her certain
Sense of how to die. She wants to listen.
To pray. And she is, as we are, straining
To unravel the final requirement
Of life that is too much now. Tonight she
Is very tired. And at the last moment,
When all things of her are still, it will be
Her strong hands that I love the best. Nails blunt.
Thumbs square. Palms open and turned toward me.