Sarah Russell
Boby Clariana
A Force of Nature and a Treasure
By Sarah Russell
My mother-in-law Boby Clariana was a force of nature, and I’ve written many poems about her over the years. After an introduction to her indominable spirit in the first poem, I’ve picked ones tracing her last days. It helped me to write as I was dealing with losing one of the most treasured people in my life.
The picture of her is my favorite. At Thanksgiving, several years before she died, I found flowers (!) in her yard and brought them in to her. She couldn’t quite believe that things were blooming so late in the year and was overjoyed.
By Sarah Russell
My mother-in-law Boby Clariana was a force of nature, and I’ve written many poems about her over the years. After an introduction to her indominable spirit in the first poem, I’ve picked ones tracing her last days. It helped me to write as I was dealing with losing one of the most treasured people in my life.
The picture of her is my favorite. At Thanksgiving, several years before she died, I found flowers (!) in her yard and brought them in to her. She couldn’t quite believe that things were blooming so late in the year and was overjoyed.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Mother-in-law
After Wallace Stevens
An Arkansas farm woman, Boby loves
Sunday drives after church to see what folks
are planting and to tidy up the family graves.
In spring, when the fields are ripe
with fresh manure, Boby takes a deep breath.
“Smells like money,” she says.
Honesty is her virtue. She told me once
“You’re not exactly what we hoped for.”
Boby has no use for corsages. “Give me
something I can put in the ground.“
She has eight flowerbeds —
lilies, gardenias, azaleas, roses.
Each granddaughter and great-grand
has a quilt pieced from a lifetime of scraps --
prints, plaids, ginghams and a bit of lace.
“They look pretty good from the road,” she says.
Her mother lived on the next farm over,
her uncles just beyond, ripples of family
for a thousand acres, bickering, loving,
gossiping, mourning.
Boby buried two husbands. The first was hers
for a quarter century. The second just four years,
“a bonus” she said after forty years a widow.
We spend fall weekends shelling wash tubs
of pecans—300 pounds some years—our fingers
raw and stained dark as the delta loam.
Always a stray underfoot—cat or mongrel dog.
They show up on her doorstep. She shrugs
and takes them in. The cats are all called Katie.
She played piano at church as the congregation
dwindled to a half-dozen stooped, gray forms.
She never cared much for the preacher.
When she turned 90, Boby announced she’d give up driving
October first. Took us awhile to figure out her birthday
was the 6th, and she knew she’d flunk the eye test.
She killed a rabid skunk in a neighbor’s driveway
with the shotgun she keeps under the bed.
“Sorry I can’t stay to visit,” she told her friend.
“I’ve got a cake in the oven.”
Now 96, she lives alone, as bent, stubborn and fragile
as wisteria, children scattered from acreage bought
a century ago. No money in farming these days.
“They’ll carry me away from here in a pine box,” she says.
First published in Third Wednesday Poetry Journal
Daylight Moon
Pale blue skies this morning and a leftover
moon, past being of use to lovers or night
farers, pallid in the light. Mother sighs.
She’s ninety-seven now and wants to die.
Crippled hands no longer quilt, clouded
eyes see only the edge of things. She sits
at the window and watches the blur
of her garden shrivel in October’s chill.
A crow bullies his way onto the feeder,
scattering the sparrows. Last night’s lovers
head for work in separate cars.
Pale blue skies this morning and a leftover
moon, past being of use to lovers or night
farers, pallid in the light. Mother sighs.
She’s ninety-seven now and wants to die.
Crippled hands no longer quilt, clouded
eyes see only the edge of things. She sits
at the window and watches the blur
of her garden shrivel in October’s chill.
A crow bullies his way onto the feeder,
scattering the sparrows. Last night’s lovers
head for work in separate cars.
First published in Misfit Magazine
November Tomatoes
A hard freeze is predicted tonight.
Time to pull out the tomatoes.
It has been a summer of sauces,
salads, bounty to share with neighbors.
I salvage several, slow to ripen
in this brisk fall air. Mother’s season
is ending too. She eats little, prays death
will take her soon. She has tended
to farewells. I collect the vines to mulch,
tug at stubborn roots. Hard work,
letting go.
First published in Rat’s Ass Review
God’s Speed
Her hours and days are seamless now,
waking, sleeping, lucid, dreaming.
This morning she called out names
I didn’t know and cried or laughed
or grew thoughtful—a retrospective
flickering through her mind. Hospice
brought solace and morphine. Near
the end I was thankful for that hazy world
where she could rest along her way.
At lunchtime when I brought her soup,
she roused. “I’m going to heaven,” she said.
I asked if she had picked out a star to call
her own, but she closed her eyes again and slept.
Covid Funeral
We gather for the service on her lawn
under ancient pecan trees, small islands
of mourners in the chill of November.
Her flower beds are dormant now. Will they bloom
next spring or be plowed under by the farmer
who buys her land? We can’t hug like people do
at funerals, can’t touch at all. We feel awkward
and virus weary. Six men in clean shirts
and dusty shoes carry her coffin to the hearse,
and she leaves the farm where she fought to stay
when age and illness ground her body to chaff
and only her spirit defied us.
We have found a home for her cat and taken
the twenty prosy sayings she embroidered
from their cheap frames on her wall. I’ll make
a quilt of them this winter before the vaccine comes
in spring. Our cars follow the hearse, a parade of ants
with breadcrumb memories, to the tiny cemetery
with its mound of dirt beside the grave. The names
on nearby stones are family—mother, father,
husband, aunts and uncles—a welcome home.
