#maxine scates

[nomorechoirs]

“Mother's Closet by Maxine Scates

[violettesiren]

It's almost spring, but cold. This morning I slipped on ice crossing the bridge over the slough—

for the first time in months I hadn't reached for the railing. The days grow longer, lighter. I walk

down to the mailbox at 5:30 and five deer are grazing near the neighbor's fenced garden, some yearlings

among them. They look up and drift farther down the hill, but the fifth approaches, stops and watches

until I open, then close, the mailbox and walk back up the road. When I turn back to look, the doe is still

watching. Along the road, where once I planted irises in too little sun, the hellebore are blooming and

the scent of daphne precedes its bloom. Yesterday, Bill mentioned an essay he'd read about the life one

didn't live but is aware of having missed. I don't think much about the life I might have had, but remember

the short film we watched about Sicilian miners descending two by two deep into the earth each day, then, shirtless,

walking through a warren of barely lit paths to drill and chip sulfur from the cave walls while above them

the life of the village, men in fields, women doing laundry, a donkey waiting with its cart, goes on without them.

Late Winter by Maxine Scates

[whisperthatruns]

Late Winter

It's almost spring, but cold. This morning I slipped on ice crossing the bridge over the slough—

for the first time in months I hadn't reached for the railing. The days grow longer, lighter. I walk

down to the mailbox at 5:30 and five deer are grazing near the neighbor's fenced garden, some yearlings

among them. They look up and drift farther down the hill, but the fifth approaches, stops and watches

until I open, then close, the mailbox and walk back up the road. When I turn back to look, the doe is still

watching. Along the road, where once I planted irises in too little sun, the hellebore are blooming and

the scent of daphne precedes its bloom. Yesterday, Bill mentioned an essay he'd read about the life one

didn't live but is aware of having missed. I don't think much about the life I might have had, but remember

the short film we watched about Sicilian miners descending two by two deep into the earth each day, then, shirtless,

walking through a warren of barely lit paths to drill and chip sulfur from the cave walls while above them

the life of the village, men in fields, women doing laundry, a donkey waiting with its cart, goes on without them.

Maxine Scates (2022, from Copper Nickel, text from Verse Daily)

[mythologyofblue]

This is everything she ever closed a door on, the broom closet of childhood where no one could ever find a broom. Here, layer upon layer, nothing breathes: photo albums curl at the edges, books she brought home from the library where she worked, handled by thousands of other hands before their final exile where they’ve waited, paper and more paper taking in the ocean air, about to sprout. Mother’s sitting on the bed with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets what among the treasures she hopes I’ll find, but I know I’m seeing what she doesn't want me to see, the daughter cleaning doing what the son would never do. After an hour of excavation the console TV emerges from beneath forgotten sweaters and balled up nylons saved for stuffing puppets, a long ago church project— the TV arrived in 1966 same day I crushed the fender of the car, upsetting the careful plans she’d made for payment. She wants to leave so much behind. Hours later I’ve found nothing I want but the purple mache mask I made in the fourth grade. I like its yellow eyes. She looks at each magazine I remove, saving every word about my brother, the coach. He’s sixty and a long dead mouse has eaten the laces of his baby shoes. I want order. I say I’m old myself, I’ve started throwing things away. I’m lying. I’ve kept everything she’s ever given me.

-Maxine Scates, ”Mother's Closet"

[amaised44]

[thesefevereddays]

Flyway

By Maxine Scates

The wind has come up

and now there is a cloud behind the mountain.

How many times did she tell me the story

of my birth? The story ended when she’d say,

and that was the happiest day of my life, and

I’d feel a little sad because I’d had no child

and would never have a day like hers. Sometimes,

I can see the river bottom and its glitter

of stones. Then a fish leaps in sunlight rippling

the surface. Sometimes, I listen to the birds,

our seers, the pileated always laughing. I’ve read

the dead in dreams are never dead,

and yes, it is their aliveness that is reassuring,

their going on even as they leave us here. Just now

the shadow of wings, and a far-off child’s voice

shouting Hey, Mom.

[spoetrys-blog]

Last

At dusk the streetlights stand like beacons to the underworld, a girl runs toward me beaded with rain and sweat. I think husk, wheels— seeds rattle, shake loose and a candle is held to the egg’s red mass she is too young to see. In Pompeii those bodies are not bodies but plaster poured into the cavity where a body once lay, no less a hand pushing back ash, no less a woman with her unborn child twisting for a pocket of air, the forge, the fire, the glimpsed blade, a door we close quickly, just as my brother said Now I know I will die, and I thought of course and not me in the same second. We kept driving, arrived at the airport and the next day our father did die— aria, the birds rising at the sound of the explosion and plums, succulent ashy, burnished. Walking down the Spanish Steps on a Sunday morning in October, no one there yet, Keats’ window open, you said Ten or fifteen years from now when I am gone, come back. You touched our absence from each other, the fifteen years ahead you’ve always had— when in dreams I am older and you remain as you were when we first met, before devotion was returned, or was it that I let it be—our lives together suddenly recognizable as if seared pages fallen from a larger book.

Maxine Scates

[motherground]

Vice

When the waiter brought the almond liquor as courtesy to our table,

I hesitated, remembering Augustine’s sin, the one rewarded by nothing,

neither the delicious anticipation nor the fall. But the fragrance of a flowering

orchard told me my sin would be rewarded if I took my first drink in twenty years,

and even as my chorus chattered, did the work I’m too lazy to do—

this one hates me because I’m a drunk, this one forgives and says I sought the spiritual

in the spirit’s clear distillation, and this one suggests the timing is right—I knew enough

to know they all could be wrong. And when I reread Augustine just now, I found

how much I’d misremembered. As a boy, he’d stolen pears fit only for pigs, yet ate them

anyway. He wanted to taste forbidden fruit and so did I. My almost sin lived

for its moment with the ringing bells, wild horses and lush tremolos accompanying a fall.

But when the music faded, I saw two of us were there—

me and you, the one I will not hurt, who drank my flowering orchard for me.

-- maxine scates