Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood
Press) by Andrea Potos
Andrea Potos and her mother
By Andrea Potos
I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The first five years of my life I lived above my Yaya (grandmother in Greek) and Papouli (grandfather in Greek) in a duplex apartment on 52nd Street in Milwaukee; I’d go up and down the winding back stairs several times a day to be with them. They were bedrock in my life, and so much of my poetry is inspired by them.
When I was six, my parents got me the hardcover “Little House in the Big Woods” for Christmas; I was hooked on reading from then on. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, not surprisingly, were my favorites. I wanted to be Jo March, scribbling stories and novels on top of old trunks in the garrett. . . Later the Bronte sisters also became key figures in my literary passions.
My father worked for a television station in Milwaukee, and when I was in sixth grade, he made my entire year by bringing home the actual film of Little Women, the 1949 version starring June Allyson and Margaret O’Brien. The station’s cameraman came too, and they set up a projector and a movie screen in our living room. I had all my friends over to watch. For one whole weekend, we were transported and ecstatic.
At age 13, we moved to Long Island for four years, due to my father’s job transfer. I never considered New York my home though. We moved back to Milwaukee, and then I headed to Madison for college. Madison has been home ever since, with a brief foray in Chicago for three and a half years while my husband did a postdoc at the University of Chicago.
My poems arrive from my ancestral ties and my family, from my love of certain literary figures and from travel. For poetry’s sake at least, I make every effort to place myself in, relish and observe the present moment . I keep a daily writing practice, though sometimes I have to skip a day here and there, especially when travelling. But I always return home with fresh images and inspiration.
These poems are from my book, Her Joy Becomes.
Trying to Teach My Mother to Crochet
I wanted something for her hands--
the dusky blue crochet hook I bought for her
and blue acrylic yarn the color
of the Greek sea near the long ago
city of her birth.
She didn’t ask for this lesson.
In her steady kindness, she went along
with me, trying to match her fingers
to the flow of looping yarn.
I worried she wouldn’t continue
when her mind told her
she needed another cigarette,
though the cancer had already set in both lungs
and her treatment begun. I never considered
how she might want to live her last months or years
doing what gave her balm, the familiar comfort
to inhale, taste and release a swirling elegance
of smoke. All I knew was my own need
to halt what had already begun, to keep her
present and seamlessly shawled around us.
In the Imaging Room
The lights were dim, a grey screen
lit with numbers I couldn’t see from where
I lay. The technician kept her quiet,
would not admit to seeing anything interesting
when I asked. I cannot diagnose.
I wanted conversational relief
for my pinched discomfort, my breath a stalled
bird kept in my throat, only released when
I turned my gaze to the wall--
a painting of seashells I discerned
enough in the light--pale pink conch
and abalone, moonsnail and scallop.
And in the center, a chambered nautilus,
its spiralled heart reaching toward mine.
The Mammogram Technician Asked if I Wanted to
Take a Look
Profile of a motherland--
sloping hill and veins bold
with blood ore,
rivers of light criss-
crossing and coursing
from view, I prayed
my eyes were true--
I saw no errant stone.
I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The first five years of my life I lived above my Yaya (grandmother in Greek) and Papouli (grandfather in Greek) in a duplex apartment on 52nd Street in Milwaukee; I’d go up and down the winding back stairs several times a day to be with them. They were bedrock in my life, and so much of my poetry is inspired by them.
When I was six, my parents got me the hardcover “Little House in the Big Woods” for Christmas; I was hooked on reading from then on. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, not surprisingly, were my favorites. I wanted to be Jo March, scribbling stories and novels on top of old trunks in the garrett. . . Later the Bronte sisters also became key figures in my literary passions.
My father worked for a television station in Milwaukee, and when I was in sixth grade, he made my entire year by bringing home the actual film of Little Women, the 1949 version starring June Allyson and Margaret O’Brien. The station’s cameraman came too, and they set up a projector and a movie screen in our living room. I had all my friends over to watch. For one whole weekend, we were transported and ecstatic.
At age 13, we moved to Long Island for four years, due to my father’s job transfer. I never considered New York my home though. We moved back to Milwaukee, and then I headed to Madison for college. Madison has been home ever since, with a brief foray in Chicago for three and a half years while my husband did a postdoc at the University of Chicago.
My poems arrive from my ancestral ties and my family, from my love of certain literary figures and from travel. For poetry’s sake at least, I make every effort to place myself in, relish and observe the present moment . I keep a daily writing practice, though sometimes I have to skip a day here and there, especially when travelling. But I always return home with fresh images and inspiration.
These poems are from my book, Her Joy Becomes.
Trying to Teach My Mother to Crochet
I wanted something for her hands--
the dusky blue crochet hook I bought for her
and blue acrylic yarn the color
of the Greek sea near the long ago
city of her birth.
She didn’t ask for this lesson.
In her steady kindness, she went along
with me, trying to match her fingers
to the flow of looping yarn.
I worried she wouldn’t continue
when her mind told her
she needed another cigarette,
though the cancer had already set in both lungs
and her treatment begun. I never considered
how she might want to live her last months or years
doing what gave her balm, the familiar comfort
to inhale, taste and release a swirling elegance
of smoke. All I knew was my own need
to halt what had already begun, to keep her
present and seamlessly shawled around us.
In the Imaging Room
The lights were dim, a grey screen
lit with numbers I couldn’t see from where
I lay. The technician kept her quiet,
would not admit to seeing anything interesting
when I asked. I cannot diagnose.
I wanted conversational relief
for my pinched discomfort, my breath a stalled
bird kept in my throat, only released when
I turned my gaze to the wall--
a painting of seashells I discerned
enough in the light--pale pink conch
and abalone, moonsnail and scallop.
And in the center, a chambered nautilus,
its spiralled heart reaching toward mine.
The Mammogram Technician Asked if I Wanted to
Take a Look
Profile of a motherland--
sloping hill and veins bold
with blood ore,
rivers of light criss-
crossing and coursing
from view, I prayed
my eyes were true--
I saw no errant stone.
Andrea’s mother as a young woman
Sleep Skills
These days I wake up tired
after hours skimming sleep’s
surface like a hungry bird, waiting.
They say it’s a fact of growing older,
to lose the skill for sleep infants\
and teenagers mindlessly have.
I think of my Yaya, when I was a girl,
she was already dressed before first light;
her body telling her it was time
to live the day, tend to her needles and thread,
her yarn; and in her kitchen, the flour and water
in their porcelain bowls; a woman waiting for the morning
to rise under her hands.
In the Healer’s Room
I felt myself carried
across wine-dark waters
as if a ship’s manifest were kept
near me, the unknown
and the known--
paternal grandmother Helen,
a scared girl of seven coming over
from Patras;
maternal grandmother Aristea,
an astonished bride of 19
from Piraeus, holding my
8-month-old mother in her arms
as the ship rose and dipped, glided
and churned along the endless
waves for weeks.
I give thanks to the waters
that held them up to land them here,
where I may remember something
of their stories within
my body now.
These days I wake up tired
after hours skimming sleep’s
surface like a hungry bird, waiting.
They say it’s a fact of growing older,
to lose the skill for sleep infants\
and teenagers mindlessly have.
I think of my Yaya, when I was a girl,
she was already dressed before first light;
her body telling her it was time
to live the day, tend to her needles and thread,
her yarn; and in her kitchen, the flour and water
in their porcelain bowls; a woman waiting for the morning
to rise under her hands.
In the Healer’s Room
I felt myself carried
across wine-dark waters
as if a ship’s manifest were kept
near me, the unknown
and the known--
paternal grandmother Helen,
a scared girl of seven coming over
from Patras;
maternal grandmother Aristea,
an astonished bride of 19
from Piraeus, holding my
8-month-old mother in her arms
as the ship rose and dipped, glided
and churned along the endless
waves for weeks.
I give thanks to the waters
that held them up to land them here,
where I may remember something
of their stories within
my body now.
Andrea Potos mother
Her Decision
This time it came not from
some sprung blaze of the instant.
It arrived more
as an ochre mellowing,
a ripening
in some untended field.
A peace whispered to her
Step away,
a different happiness unfolding.
Say Autumn/For My Mother
after Stanley Plumly
I would give it back to you, perhaps in a season,
say autumn, I would give you back leaves,
ochre, crimson, fire orange of the sprawling maple
across the street from your house, that cherished sight
every October, the month of your birth, mid-way through
the season Mother, months of irrepressible beauty and change
deepening, I would give you back more autumns,
free from back pain and money worries, still breathing,
no lesions in your lungs, I would give you back my presence
nourished beside you, both of us at your window, rapt,
witness to the daily gift of that October tree.
This time it came not from
some sprung blaze of the instant.
It arrived more
as an ochre mellowing,
a ripening
in some untended field.
A peace whispered to her
Step away,
a different happiness unfolding.
Say Autumn/For My Mother
after Stanley Plumly
I would give it back to you, perhaps in a season,
say autumn, I would give you back leaves,
ochre, crimson, fire orange of the sprawling maple
across the street from your house, that cherished sight
every October, the month of your birth, mid-way through
the season Mother, months of irrepressible beauty and change
deepening, I would give you back more autumns,
free from back pain and money worries, still breathing,
no lesions in your lungs, I would give you back my presence
nourished beside you, both of us at your window, rapt,
witness to the daily gift of that October tree.
Funeral
For my uncle
Twenty-two years his junior,
she was never supposed to leave
him first. I slipped beside him,
wrapped my arm around his shoulder,
felt the dark wool of his suit,
so stately in his sorrow.
Thank you honey
he whispered, staring ahead, heavy
and heavier, thick and immoveable
in grief, a quarry of stone
he would chip away at for months
to come, all the years left
of her absence beside him.
We could not yet glimpse
the new form he would become.
To Buy the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Her-Joy-Becomes-Andrea-Potos/dp/1594980241
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